Working Towards Environmental Justice

Lead Investigator: Abas Shkembi

Team: Devon Payne-Sturges, Jon Zelner, Sung Kyun Park, Rick Neitzel

Source of Funding: None

Description: Exposures in the workplace, such as heat and COVID-19, cause hundreds of thousands of cases of disease, illness, and tens of thousands of deaths every year. Further, the most highly exposed workers in the US may be the same individuals also highly exposed to pollutants at their homes and communities. This leads to a situation where some individuals may be cumulatively burdened by excessive exposures both in and out of work. This may be further compounded by the fact that racial/ethnic minorities in the US may be most affected by this cumulative burden, leading to occupational and environmental justice (OEJ) issues in the US. However, a critical research gap remains in understanding the full extent of cumulative occupational and environmental exposures on health and health disparities. Without this knowledge, interventions to reduce environmental health disparities in the US may be ineffective. The primary objective of this dissertation proposal is to investigate racial/ethnic health disparities in communities across the US as a function of long-term, cumulative exposure inequalities to multiple sources of environmental pollution, workplace hazards, and social inequities.

Objectives

• This will be done by developing and assessing the utility of 14 novel measures of workplace exposure for all US neighborhoods from 2007-2019 (Aim 1). Drawing on several publicly available data sources on employment, job-exposure matrices, and geospatial environmental data, we will estimate, for every US census tract, the percent of the workforce exposed to various chemical, physical, biological, safety, psychosocial, and climate-change related hazards. This will be first time that comprehensive nationwide, census tract-level estimates of hazardous work exposure will be constructed. We will examine whether racial/ethnic minority communities are the most disproportionately burdened by cumulative occupational and environmental exposures and whether communities burdened by these occupational and environmental injustices may have increased mortality risk.
• We will then characterize the cardiovascular mortality impacts of inequities in cumulative exposure to noise pollution in workplace and residential environments on racial/ethnic health disparities (Aim 2). Using a rich data set of hundreds of millions of person-days of personal noise exposure measurements from >130,000 participants of the nationwide Apple Hearing Study, we will investigate whether racial/ethnic minorities are disproportionately exposed to noise pollution at work and at home. Using published relative risk estimates, we will then model the number of cardiovascular deaths that could be prevented if racial/ethnic inequities in cumulative noise exposure did not exist.
• Lastly, using the stress-exposure disease framework, we will investigate whether cumulative noise pollution mediates racial/ethnic disparities in perceived stress and which types of noise (work, non-work, and sleep) contributes the most to stress disparities among Apple Hearing Study participants (Aim 3).