Climate and Environmental Health Mid Term

What is "Environmental Health"?

Environmental health focuses on how issues with our environment can cause varying health outcomes. For example, pollution, unsafe drinking water, and toxic waste are some things that can make a person's environment worse and cause them to have negative health effects.

Give two examples of how the physical environment influences population health. Please specify the environmental stressor and health endpoint/outcome for each physical environment. 

water: if the water is unsafe, the community could have an outcome of lead poisoning and cancer

air: if the air in a community is near a factory, they may have cancer or asthma.

The path by which the contaminant moves from a source to a human receptor is called

 exposure pathway

Local residents’ exposure to severe air pollution caused by Independence Day firework displays is an example of

acute exposure

Which of the following methods is considered the gold standard for exposure assessment

biomarker measurements

Assessing aggregate exposure to a series of compounds with the same biological mechanism is called ________ exposure assessment

cumulative

The totality of exposure events that affect the person is defined as

exposome

How EPA's Environmental Health Paradigm differs from WHO's DPSEEA model?

The EPA's Environmental Health Paradigm differs from WHO's DPSEEA model is that the EPA model only focuses on the scientific exposure, while the WHO model has a broader understanding and focuses on the societal and social aspects of exposure. The DPSEEA model also considers control of the exposure/pollution.

British investigators conducted a study to compare measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine history among 1,294 children with pervasive development disorder (e.g., autism and Asperger’s syndrome) and 4,469 children without such disorders. (They found no association.) This is an example of which type(s) of study?

case-control

A feature of an observed association, indicating that the observed association was unlikely to have occurred by chance

statistical significance

Which one below is an epidemiologic measure of association?

risk ratio

In the definition of environmental epidemiology, “determinants” generally includes:

environmental risk factors

Which study design has an appropriate counterfactual control group, and hence provides less biased measures of disease associated with environmental exposures?

 Randomized controlled trial

Objectives: The main objective of the UFIREG project was to investigate the short-term associations between UFP and fine particulate matter (PM)<2.5μm (PM2.5) and daily (cause-specific) mortality in five European Cities. We also examined the effects of PM<10μm (PM10) and coarse particles (PM2.5-10).

Methods: UFP (20-100nm), PM and meteorological data were measured in Dresden and Augsburg (Germany), Prague (Czech Republic), Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Chernivtsi (Ukraine). Daily counts of natural and cardio-respiratory mortality were collected for all five cities. Depending on data availability, the following study periods were chosen: Augsburg and Dresden 2011-2012, Ljubljana and Prague 2012-2013, Chernivtsi 2013-March 2014. The associations between air pollutants and health outcomes were assessed using confounder-adjusted Poisson regression models examining single (lag 0-lag 5) and cumulative lags (lag 0-1, lag 2-5, and lag 0-5).

What is this study design?

ecological

How can you differentiate a randomized controlled trial (RCT) from quasi-experimental epidemiological study?

 Random assignment of intervention happens in RCT

The type of epidemiology study in which individuals are identified according to exposure and followed to determine subsequent disease risk is known as

cohort

Which measure of association below is not statistically significant?

(A) risk difference: 2.4 (95% confidence interval: 0.8, 4.5)

(B) risk difference: -2.4 (95% confidence interval: -4.5, -0.8)

(C) odds ratio: 1.5 (95% confidence interval, 0.8 : 1.9)

(D) odds ratio: 1.5 (95% confidence interval, 1.2 : 1.9)

C. odds ratio: 1.5 (95% confidence interval, 0.8 : 1.9)

Preeclampsia was associated with a 38% increased odds (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 1.38, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.13-1.69) when women were exposed to concentrations between 20-69 milligrams per liter (mg/L), above EPA's recommendation for individuals on a very low sodium dietLinks to an external site.. Increased odds of 5% and 16% were also found at concentrations between 70-102 mg/L and greater than 256 mg/L but were not statistically significant. The lower odds at higher sodium concentrations may be due to consumers using alternative drinking water sources due to taste issues that are noted to arise between 30-60 mg/L.

Question: Based on the adjusted odds ratio (aOR), what is your impression about the relationship between sodium in drinking water and preeclampsia?

statistically significant