Researchers at Rice University will soon begin a study to determine the impact that exposure to environmental toxins has on children ages 1 to 6, reports Mike Williams for Texas Medical Center News. The team has received a four-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, which it will use to analyze statistics gathered in North Carolina over more than 20 years on air pollution, housing quality, and educational systems to learn where children are most exposed to toxins.
Marie Lynn Miranda, Rice’s Howard R. Hughes Provost and a professor of statistics that is leading the study, expects the assessment will help reveal how exposure to environmental mixtures shaped educational outcomes for children and identify subtle impacts upon the entire population across space and time. The Rice team believes the tools it creates will be useful for researchers around the world who model environmental effects on people, especially those in communities that face such social stressors as deteriorating housing, inadequate access to health care, under-resourced schools, high unemployment, crime and poverty.
“For a long time, we’ve looked at individual environmental exposures and tried to figure out what impact that has on people’s health,” said Miranda, whose group gathered most of the data during her 21 years on the Duke University faculty from 1990 to 2011. “We’ve come to understand that people are not exposed to contaminants one at a time. They’re often exposed to multiple contaminants at the same time, and the methods for figuring out the impact of that exposure are quite complicated and underdeveloped."
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