This research project addresses the question, "Are the deleterious effects of exposure to chemicals such as lead, mercury, and bisphenol A, the same for everyone? Or are they affected by life circumstances?" There is increasing evidence linking early life exposure to chemicals to the contemporary epidemic of diabetes and obesity in the United States. There is also increasing evidence that the effects of these chemical exposures are intensified by adverse life circumstance like poverty, stress and poor nutrition. Thus the long-term life impact of chemical exposures on the poor might be greater than for other groups, given that ill-health affects educational attainment and work productivity. It is critical then to understand the relationship between life circumstances and chemical exposures in order to inform public policy concerning the allocation of scare resources towards environmental clean up and chemical regulation.
The research will be conducted in Mexico City, Mexico, where obesity and diabetes rates have risen dramatically in the last decades. In 1995, a group of environmental health scientists from the United States began a chemical exposure study with a large group of poor and working class pregnant women in Mexico City. The study has become the largest and longest running of its kind in all of North America, and has contributed several key findings about the links between early life chemical exposure to obesity and diabetes. However, while the project scientists have collected an unparalleled array of biological samples and survey data from the over 7000 women and children enrolled in the study, they know very little about the daily life circumstance that may affect how chemical exposures impact the health of these study participants. The depth and breadth of this biological data set offers a unique opportunity for a social scientist to investigate how chemical exposure and home and neighborhood environment shape health. The investigator for this study, medical anthropologist Dr. Elizabeth Roberts of the University of Michigan, will undertake intensive ethnographic observations of the daily life of six study participant families in their home and neighborhood environments over the course of a year. When the investigator completes these observations her data will be correlated with the biological exposure data collected about these same families for the last nineteen years. Findings from this collaborative research will provide insight into how life circumstances, over the long term, may intertwine with chemical exposures to shape the health and economic status of urban poor and working class families. Understanding this intertwined relationship can then contribute to developing effective environmental and health care policy in the United States for today and for the future.
