|
|
|
|
|
3116.0: Monday, November 8, 2004: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM | |||
Oral | |||
| |||
| This session will provide an overview of biomonitoring practices, the use of data to develop public health policy, legislative initiatives and community action plans. The session will begin with a review of how biomonitoring data may inform patient assessment and will discuss how biomonitoring studies have focussed medical attention on the special vulnerabilities of children to toxic chemical exposure. Discussions will include a review of emerging science, which indicates that biomonitoring data may help support changing paradigms in chemical toxicity evaluation. Further discussion will address the need to incorporate the concept of uncertainty, based on biomonitoring study outcomes, when foresight is applied to the development of public health practices. This overview will provide background for a series of case studies demonstrating the use of biomonitoring data by communities or health activists involved in community-based participatory health research as a means to push for change in a variety of arenas. This session will also discuss the limitations inherent in terms of data gaps in biomonitoring studies and how such gaps might be addressed. | |||
| Learning Objectives: 1. Participants will be introduced by concrete example to the idea that biomonitoring studies provide useful and complex data constituting proof of human toxic chemical exposure in ways that other kinds of environmental monitoring and toxic chemical exposure modeling cannot do. Nevertheless, using biomonitoring data effectively so that it can inform policy change or community action can be problematic, given the limitations inherent in biomonitoring data, and part of the craft of biomonitoring is the development of decision-making processes in the face of uncertainty. Through a discussion of chemical body burdens in terms of children's special vulnerability to the effects of chemical exposure, participants will learn how uncertainty needs to be incorporated in regulations and health practices to ensure that such regulations and practices are truly protective of human well-being. 2. Participants will learn how diverse communities engage in biomonitoring as a primary tool for community-based participatory health research, how data from such studies has been used to inform public health policy, legislative initiatives and community-based campaigns for health care. Participants will gain an understanding about the limitations of biomonitoring by communities, including the difficulty of adequate resources to produce valid data, the complexities around confidentiality issues, and the difficulties imposed by the need to combine biomonitoring data with other sources of information in order to identify possible sources or pathways of chemical exposures. 3. Participants will learn about the reasons behind the current California legislative initiative to mandate biomonitoring, to include the biomonitoring of breastmilk in pilot studies, and will develop an understanding about concerns surrounding breastmilk monitoring voiced by breastfeeding advocacy groups and others and how these concerns might be best addressed. Participants will become familiar with the range of opinions around the value of biomonitoring and how biomonitoring information can best be used to develop a full picture of human exposures to chemicals. | |||
| Steve L. Heilig, MPH Polly Hoppin, ScD Molly Jacobs, MPH Derek G Shendell, MPH, DEnv Rebecca A. Head, PhD, DABT | |||
Biomonitoring, vulnerable populations, and precaution ![[ Recorded presentation ]](/static/img/filetypes/16x16/wrf.gif){kind=small} Ted Schettler, MD, MPH | |||
| State public health biomonitoring - a case study from New York Henry M. Spliethoff, MS, George A. Eadon, PhD | |||
| Two case studies of "benchmark" community biomonitoring David Carpenter, MD | |||
| Biomonitoring using breastmilk as a biospecimen Sharyle Patton | |||
| A community response using biomontoring as a tool David Baker | |||
| See individual abstracts for presenting author's disclosure statement and author's information. | |||
| Organized by: | Environment | ||
| CE Credits: | CME, Health Education (CHES), Nursing | ||