The primary purpose of this project is to establish a community-based approach to residential sampling to identify and reduce health risks from lead, pesticides and other environmental hazards. The investigators will partner locally with the Better Housing League and Baby's Milk Fund Clinics and nationally with the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning and the National Center for Lead Safe Housing. The first goal of this project is to test and validate tools for community members to assess levels of contaminants in their home environment. This goal will further our efforts to strengthen right-to-know laws by providing community members with tools to assess environmental contamination in their homes. It will also provide information about exposure assessment by occupants that may be useful for conducting large-scale epidemiologic studies. The second goal is to increase community awareness and involvement in understanding the role of environment in developmental disorders, hearing loss and school problems. The latter goal will be accomplished by establishing a resource center at the Better Housing League, continued advocacy to prevent morbidity and mortality due to residential hazards, and community outreach. The specific steps will be to: 1) Incorporate a pesticide wipe sampling test kit with the investigators' ongoing lead-sampling test kit pilot study; 2 ) Evaluate the accuracy of home sampling test kits for lead and pesticides in floor dust collected by community participants compared with repeat samples taken by trained, community workers; 3) Provide community-based organizations with knowledge and tools to assist community residents on how to identify and control residential hazards; 4) Disseminate data on the reliability of home sampling test kits and provide a tool for respondents to collect environmental samples for large, population-based studies; 5) Assist in the development of a Healthy Homes Resource Center to provide the community information on residential hazards at the Better Housing League. If successful, this community-based research project would provide tools for families and communities to identify environmental neurotoxins, and disseminate information by establishing a healthy homes resource center at the Better Housing League and nationally with the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning and National Center for Lead-Safe Housing. The results of this project would also stimulate community-wide prevention efforts and exposure assessment by participants in population-based studies.
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