Hurricane Harvey DR2: Individual Chemical Exposure Assessments

<p>PROJECT SUMMARYOver 100,000 homes were damaged or destroyed when the Houston area experienced over 50 inches of rain andrecord-breaking catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Harvey. Importantly, Superfund sites andchemical/petroleum facilities potentially experienced chemical releases. Individuals and communities withenvironmental health concerns reached out to us for assistance. To respond, we formed a multi-institutional teamwith expertise relevant to NIEHS disaster research response (DR2) goals: environmental chemistry, exposuresexpertise and public outreach from Oregon State University (OSU) the lead institution on this R21;environmental health, epidemiology, microbiome and clinical expertise from Baylor College of Medicine (BCM);and exposure science, environmental epidemiology, public health, community outreach and education fromUTHealth School of Public Health (UT-SPH). We traveled to Texas and recruited and enrolled two communitiesand trained BCM and (UT-SPH) about wristbands and the technology. In the following days, enrollment effortsled by BCM coupled microbiome, questionnaire and wristbands, over 150 wristbands were confirmeddistributed from three communities and flooded BCM employees within the first 30 days of the Hurricane withthe joint enrollment. Enrollment was still on-going at the time of the OSU submission, there are indicationsthat all 400 wristbands taken to Houston may be deployed in the initial exposure window. Participantfeedback has been overwhelmingly positive concerning both our efforts in the community and the wristbandtechnology. We will determine chemical exposures variations from the wristband sampler with extent of homeflooding, area-level environmental exposures and participation actively in cleanup. We collect repeatwristband measures at 6- and 12-months and examine the reductive influence of cleanup and time have onchemical exposures and we will explore if the measures are a stronger or better predictor of health outcomes.This study will generate a 1.2 million chemical data points that can be used to assess Hurricane exposures andinform about responding to future disasters.!!</p>