Rhode Island State Health Laboratories

Biomonitoring Newsletter

Volume I number 1
May 1, 2002

This newsletter provides information on trends and issues regarding toxic substances and Biomonitoring in Rhode Island.

Biomonitoring refers to the laboratory measurement of human exposure to toxic substances using human specimens such as blood, urine and saliva.

The Rhode Island HEALTH Laboratory participates in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Health Laboratory Biomonitoring Planning Grant to:

• Assess the need for biomonitoring within the state of Rhode Island. The Laboratory will collaborate with other public health partners including physicians and epidemiologists to make this assessment. Special consideration will be given to evaluating exposures in racial and ethnic groups that may be at increased risk from exposure.
• Develop a plan for implementing or expanding biomonitoring capacity including an inventory of existing biomonitoring methods, identify new biomonitoring capacity to meet the needs identified in the assessment phase and to identify additional requirements of equipment, facilities and personnel to meet these new needs.

The long-term objective of this grant is to increase laboratory capacity to study the effects of environmental contaminants on the health of all Rhode Islanders. By doing this research, researchers can obtain hard data, epidemiologists can determine safe levels, and policy makers can make informed decisions on the environment.

Environmental health and biomonitoring play an important role in the health of Rhode Islanders. Lead poisoning of Rhode Island children in older housing units and the Attorney General’s lawsuit against paint manufacturers illustrate how biomonitoring affects us all.

January 17, 2002 Providence – Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy announced that he has secured a $200,000 federal appropriation for the Occupational and Environmental Health Center of Rhode Island, located at 410 South Main Street in Providence.

The innovative non-profit health center, which opened in November 2000 and is the only one of its kind in the state, provides occupational and environmental health clinical services, workplace evaluations, and educational programs to assist employees and employers in identifying and preventing work-related injury and disease.

The center also serves as a resource for health care providers and for health professionals to share information. A system is being developed to track the incidence of occupational and environmental illnesses and injury in Rhode Island. This will provide the state with new capabilities of using the information collected to assist in the identification, evaluation, treatment and prevention of occupational and illness and injury.

The National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals is a new publication that will provide an ongoing assessment of the exposure of the U.S. population to environmental chemicals using biomonitoring. For this Report, an environmental chemical means a chemical compound or chemical element present in air, water, soil, dust, food or other environmental media. Biomonitoring is the assessment of human exposure to chemicals by measuring the chemicals or their metabolites (breakdown products) in human specimens, such as blood or urine.The Report provides exposure information about people participating in CDC’s ongoing national survey of the general U.S. population – the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

NHANES is unique in its ability to examine public health issues that can best addressed through physical and laboratory examinations of the U.S. population. The first release of the Report is restricted to general U.S. population data for the year 1999 from NHANES.

The first Report provides information about levels of 27 environmental chemicals in the U.S. population. These substances include metals (e.g., lead, mercury, and uranium), organophospate pesticide metabolites, pthalate metabolites, and cotinine (a marker of tobacco smoke exposure). The full report can be obtained on-line at www.cdc.gov/nceh/dls/report/

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 31 -- For the first time, researchers have shown that children who breathe heavily polluted air are much more likely to develop asthma, according to a decade-long study released today.

The scientists said the study is the strongest evidence yet that smog can not only aggravate existing childhood asthma, which has reached epidemic proportions among American youth, but may actually be one cause of the life-threatening disease.

The full article is available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/articles/A6057-2002Jan31.html