Repeat Home Visits & Alternative Sampling Techniques in the Mini-CHILD Study ("Mini-CHILD II")

Occupational And Environmental Health

Population and Public Health

Accurate exposure assessment is a crucial component in epidemiologic studies of the relationship between environmental pollution and adverse health outcomes.  Moreover, reliable assessments of exposure distributions across diverse populations are a key part of environmental risk assessment and risk management.  However, exposure assessments among large populations are often inadequate due to limitations in available exposure assessment methods, challenges in assessing exposures
in outdoor and indoor microenvironments, cost, and/or excessive burdens on individuals under study.  The major focus of this research is to better characterize temporal variations in house dust and
health-relevant constituents such as traffic-generated air pollution markers, indoor biological pollutants, and phthalate plasticizers in order to understand the potential for residential dust samples to characterize long-term exposure in studies of chronic health effects among infants and children.  Our work will leverage off of the Vancouver-based pilot of the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development Study (“mini-CHILD”).