This application proposes to further environmental public health research by: (1) focusing on health disparities that contribute disproportionately to premature death and morbidity found among poor and racial/ethnic minorities;(2) expanding the definition of environment to include built, social, and policy environments in addition to the natural environment;(3) employing High Throughput Analysis (HTA), spatial analyses, and multi-level analyses to increase our understanding of the relationships between health and environmental factors at the state, county, and sub-county levels, over time;(4) conducting trans-disciplinary training on environmental health disparities;and (5) engaging health disparities communities in the research endeavor through PPGIS and interactive mapping.
Three Specific Aims are proposed: 1. To establish an environmental health disparities research core that supports analysis of the complex interactions between health disparities and the natural, built, social and policy environments;2. To promote the use of trans-disciplinary models and analyses to increase knowledge about the complex relationships between health disparities and the physical, built, social and policy environments;3. To use public participatory geographic information systems (PPGIS) to engage community stakeholders in the use of spatial data and interactive mapping to reduce health disparities.
Aims will be carried out by establishing an Environmental Health Disparities Core (EHDC) and integrating EHDC activities into the executive, research, research training, and community engagement cores of the parent p-20 grant. An inter-institutional, trans-disciplinary team of investigators has been recruited to oversee the development of a relational data base and web portal and to analyze relationships between health disparities and environmental factors. Collaborating institutions include the Department of Bioinformatics &Computational Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, and the Universities Space Research Association at Marshall Space Flight Center/National Space Science and Technology Center. Huntsville. AL.
Only two of the eleven southeastern 'Stroke Belt'states currently participate in the CDC's EPHT initiative. Current EPHT efforts are limited in their approach as they pertain to health disparities. A focus on health disparities will require a more comprehensive, ecological or systems approach that extends the exposure disease paradigm to include the effects of the built, social, and policy environments.
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