Environmental Health

What is environmental health? Environmental health is the study of factors in our environment that can affect human health and disease. Environmental exposures cause hundreds of thousands of illnesses each year, including asthma and cancers. Environmental health professionals learn how to identify, prevent and control those exposures to protect health.

Freshwater harmful cyanobacterial blooms (HCBs) present a mounting threat to public health outcomes and lake ecosystem services. The current climate crisis is expected to intensify the occurrence of freshwater HCBs in recreational water bodies, their formation of potent toxins, and resultant human exposures.

Hair is a unique matrix for metal deposition, as it offers a “timeline” of prior exposures (Stadlbauer et al., 2005). This spatiotemporal relationship of exposures along the hair can make possible the estimation of time and duration of exposures.

This pilot study investigates the impact of regular and irregular flushing routines on microbial contamination in eyewash stations across a university, sampling a total of 70 eyewash stations.