Research

It was while I was a doctoral student at City University of New York, where I had started out putting different chemicals in rat brains, and trying to figure out if their behavior changed. One day in 1978, my mentor asked me to go to Michigan, where there had been an environmental disaster a few years before. A bag of flame retardants had gotten mixed up with a bag of cattle feed, and people had drunk the milk and eaten the beef. A book and film later came out about the disaster, “The Poisoning of Michigan.”

At Berkeley, I did research on many different chemicals and reproductive outcomes. Then in 1998, NIH asked for proposals for centers for children’s environmental health. We had a lot of discussion in our department about what we should focus on. Some people wanted to focus on childhood asthma and air pollution, but I knew New York or Los Angeles were better places to come in with that.

A birth cohort study of a of primarily Latino farm working families living in Salinas Valley. We chose the Salinas Valley because we knew an agricultural extension professor with connections to local clinics, because it was closer to Berkeley than the Central Valley, and because they had farming more months out of every year, so there was less mobility for our study subjects. Also, pesticide application was more concentrated in that area. We are now in our 13th year, the children in our study are 10 and a half years old, and we continue to follow them. We present our results every year to the community.

If I can generalize, this is an extremely loving culture, of people who put their children first even when they have nothing. They want to do what’s best for their children. They’re proud to be part of our study. We in turn try to help the families in anyway we can. If a woman comes to us and says she has no housing, we’ll see if we can connect her to the shelter or at least to a social worker. Right now, we’re running a food drive at the School for Public Health because we’ve been told that people in our study, and farm workers in Salinas valley, are going hungry.

The biggest challenge is defining who the community is. Initially, everyone thought the community was just farmworkers, but it’s bigger than that. There are not only the farmworker families, but also the growers and the policymakers. Then, there are all those who serve the community, the social service agencies, the physicians and lawyers and educators.

Mostly because we didn’t know what we were doing. In the early days, we weren’t absolutely sure how to measure organophosphate pesticides in human material.  We thought urine would be a good way, but we weren’t sure, so we collected blood. Then we weren’t sure if saliva might be better and so on. So we collected all these biological samples. And then the idea emerged that Californians might have really high levels of brominated flame retardants, so we went back to those same samples.

I try to walk the fine line with science because when you’re working in communities where you see the complexities of the issues, like around food, the last thing you want to do is create greater insecurity in a food insecure population. Like all of sudden growers going offshore because they can’t afford to grow food here anymore. It is an incredibly complex issue, so I’m very careful about what I say. But when it comes to chemical flame retardants like PBDEs, it’s a no brainer.  They don’t save lives. So even though it’s unlike me to say this, I’m hoping we can ban them.

Bringing constituent groups together that might not speak the same language, both literally and figuratively. And trying to make them understand that this work is important and we all benefit from it. I’ve worked all over the world and on a number of different environmental disasters, and I’ve found that whenever you work with chemicals in the environment the issues are complex and political. That’s exactly what keeps my interest –the health, the politics, the social well-being of the people.