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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Genaro Lopez-Rendon, Southwest Workers Union, PO Box 830706, San Antonio, TX 78283, 210-299-2666, jillj@igc.org

Southwest Workers Union (SWU), a community based organization located in San Antonio, Texas has engaged for the past 2 years in a campaign to document and visualize health impacts from exposure to invisible toxics in the water, air and soil left by the former Kelly Air Force Base. The communities surrounding the former Kelly AFB are more than 95% low-income and Latino with a significant percentage of Spanish-speaking only residents. Over the last 8 decades, the activities of Kelly AFB poisoned the shallow groundwater under 60,000 residential homes and left the people and workers burdened with multiple illnesses as no clean-up or environmental health services are underway.

SWU has developed partnership with independent experts and universities to gain a true understanding of the health situation in the community. Residents have been disillusioned by failed promises and endless flawed studies by health agencies. The Health Symptom's Study conducted by SWU and the University of Texas Medical School, indicated that 90% of the adults and ¾ of the children in North Kelly Gardens suffer from multiple illnesses. As a grassroots strategy, SWU is going door to door collecting family health information and marking houses victimized by cancer with a purple cross. As crosses continue line the street and residents become more aware, SWU is in a collaborative process of designing a biomonitoring project, a mobile environmental health clinic and a comprehensive health survey.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe short-comings of public health agencies in addressing concerns of environmental justice communities.
• Define the characteristics of an effective community – scientist partnership to examine and describe environmental health problems in a community context.
• Articulate 3 community-led strategies used to understand the health problems in an area impacted by military toxics.

Keywords: Environmental Justice, Environmental Health Hazards

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation