Co-creating a local environmental epidemiology study: the case of citizen science for investigating air pollution and related health risks in Barcelona, Spain

Background While the health risks of air pollution attract considerable attention, both scholarly and within the general population, citizens are rarely involved in environmental health research, beyond participating as data subjects. Co-created citizen science is an approach that fosters collaboration between scientists and lay people to engage the latter in all phases of research. Currently, this approach is rare in environmental epidemiology and when co-creation processes do take place, they are often not documented. This paper describes the first stages of an ongoing co-created citizen science epidemiological project in Barcelona (Spain), that included identifying topics that citizens wish to investigate as regards air pollution and health, formulating their concerns into research questions and co-designing the study protocol. This paper also reflects key trade-offs between scientific rigor and public engagement and provides suggestions to consider when applying citizen science to environmental health studies. Methods Experts created an online survey and analyzed responses with descriptive statistics and qualitative coding. A pop-up intervention was held to discuss with citizens their concerns about air pollution and health. Later on, a community meeting was organized to narrow down the research topics and list potential research questions. In an online survey, citizens were asked to vote for the research question they would like to investigate with the experts. A workshop was held to choose a study design in which citizens would like to partake to answer their preferred research question. Results According to 488 respondents from the first survey, cognitive and mental health were the main priorities of investigation. Based on the second survey, with 27% of the votes from 556 citizens, the most popular research question was, “How does air pollution together with noise and green/blue spaces affect mental health?”. The study design selected was an observational study in which citizens provide daily repeated measures of different cognitive and mental health outcomes and relate them to the air pollution concentrations. Conclusions Based on the co-creation activities and the results obtained, we conclude that applying citizen science in an environmental health project is valuable for researchers despite some challenges such as engaging citizens and maximizing representativity.

Proposed approaches for coronaviruses elimination from wastewater: Membrane techniques and nanotechnology solutions

Since the beginning of the third Millennium, specifically during the last 18 years, three outbreaks of diseases have been recorded caused by coronaviruses (CoVs). The latest outbreak of these diseases was Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), which has been declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a pandemic. For this reason, current efforts of the environmental, epidemiology scientists, engineers, and water sector professionals are ongoing to detect CoV in environmental components, especially water, and assess the relative risk of exposure to these systems and any measures needed to protect the public health, workers, and public, in general. This review presents a brief overview of CoV in water, wastewater, and surface water based on a literature search providing different solutions to keep water protected from CoV. Membrane techniques are very attractive solutions for virus elimination in water. In addition, another essential solution is nanotechnology and its applications in the detection and protection of human and water systems.

Urban Climate Policy and Action through a Health Lens—An Untapped Opportunity

Motivated by a growing recognition of the climate emergency, reflected in the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), we outline untapped opportunities to improve health through ambitious climate actions in cities. Health is a primary reason for climate action yet is rarely integrated in urban climate plans as a policy goal. This is a missed opportunity to create sustainable alliances across sectors and groups, to engage a broad set of stakeholders, and to develop structural health promotion. In this statement, we first briefly review the literature on health co-benefits of urban climate change strategies and make the case for health-promoting climate action; we then describe barriers to integrating health in climate action. We found that the evidence-base is often insufficiently policy-relevant to be impactful. Research rarely integrates the complexity of real-world systems, including multiple and dynamic impacts of strategies, and consideration of how decision-making processes contend with competing interests and short-term electoral cycles. Due to siloed-thinking and restrictive funding opportunities, research often falls short of the type of evidence that would be most useful for decision-making, and research outputs can be cryptic to decision makers. As a way forward, we urge researchers and stakeholders to engage in co-production and systems thinking approaches. Partnering across sectors and disciplines is urgently needed so pathways to climate change mitigation and adaptation fully embrace their health-promoting potential and engage society towards the huge transformations needed. This commentary is endorsed by the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) and the International Society for Urban Health (ISUH) and accompanies a sister statement oriented towards stakeholders (published on the societies’ websites).

Pervasive structural racism in environmental epidemiology

Background Epistemological biases in environmental epidemiology prevent the full understanding of how racism’s societal impacts directly influence health outcomes. With the ability to focus on “place” and the totality of environmental exposures, environmental epidemiologists have an important opportunity to advance the field by proactively investigating the structural racist forces that drive disparities in health. Objective This commentary illustrates how environmental epidemiology has ignored racism for too long. Some examples from environmental health and male infertility are used to illustrate how failing to address racism neglects the health of entire populations. Discussion While research on environmental justice has attended to the structural sources of environmental racism, this work has not been fully integrated into the mainstream of environmental epidemiology. Epidemiology’s dominant paradigm that reduces race to a mere data point avoids the social dimensions of health and thus fails to improve population health for all. Failing to include populations who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in health research means researchers actually know very little about the effect of environmental contaminants on a range of population health outcomes. This commentary offers different practical solutions, such as naming racism in research, including BIPOC in leadership positions, mandating requirements for discussing “race”, conducting far more holistic analyses, increasing community participation in research, and improving racism training, to address the myriad of ways in which structural racism permeates environmental epidemiology questions, methods, results and impacts.

Age-dependent Effect Imposed by Rotenone Exposure

Background: The increasing awareness that environmental exposure may lead to sporadic neurological disorders has implicated rotenone to the etiology of some neurodegenerative diseases. However, the risk associated with rotenone toxicity remains controversial as a limited amount of research has studied its effects on brain health. Objectives: This work assessed the risk of rotenone exposure to mice of different ages, gender, and duration by examining in vivo effects on brains. Methods: Using a mouse model, the impact of rotenone exposure was determined by analyzing the cellular phenotype in the murine brain. Results: Our results highlight the neurological susceptibility to long-term rotenone exposure in younger ages. For such, younger mice exhibit seizures and convulsions, resulting in shorter lifespan. At the cellular level, rotenone exposure specifically alters the migrating neuroblast populations in the dentate gyrus and causes disorganized pyramidal neurons in the CA3 within the hippocampus. Our findings, albeit the absence of transgenerational inheritance, demonstrated age-related outcomes from rotenone exposure. Discussion: We demonstrated that rotenone exposure specifically influences the population of neuroblasts and pyramidal neurons residing in the hippocampus, a brain region important for learning/memory and associated with convulsive seizure. Our understanding of how exactly rotenone affected region-specific neuronal cells and the molecular mechanism behind exposure risk is still limited. From the perspective of public health, our in vivo study highlights age-related susceptibility to rotenone toxicity. Future investigations in environmental epidemiology should determine whether age and duration of exposure to rotenone in human subjects pertains to the development of seizures or other neurological abnormalities over time.

Investigating the process of ethical approval in citizen science research: the case of Public Health

Undertaking citizen science research in Public Health involving human subjects poses significant challenges concerning the traditional process of ethical approval. It requires an extension of the ethics of protection of research subjects in order to include the empowerment of citizens as citizen scientists. This paper investigates these challenges and illustrates the ethical framework and the strategies developed within the CitieS-Health project. It also proposes first recommendations generated from the experiences of five citizen science pilot studies in environmental epidemiology within this project.

71Advanced Environmental Epidemiology for Health and Climate Research

Focus and outcomes for participants The symposium will focus on insights and applications of advanced environmental epidemiology methods in health and climate research. The symposium will help the participants Rationale for the symposium, including for its inclusion in the Congress Climate change is the greatest health challenge in the 21st century. The most recent Lancet Countdown report (Watts et al. 2019) and the MJA-Lancet Countdown Australian reports (Zhang et al. 2018; Beggs et al. 2019) on health and climate change research have once again highlighted the global vulnerability to health risks from climate change. Epidemiology plays an important role in informing policy to protect the public’s health from a changing climate. However, limited research has been conducted in the field, which may be due to the methodological challenges to conducting research in climate change epidemiology (Xun et al. 2010). However, there are opportunities for advancing epidemiological research in the context of climate change, as highlighted in the recent paper published in the American Journal of Epidemiology (Anderson et al. 2019). The proposed symposium aligns precisely with the conference theme on methodological innovations in epidemiology and the need for epidemiologists who are keen to address non-traditional epidemiological health risks to support decision-making under a changing climate. This symposium will be a timely event to build capacity needed to address more extreme weather events and disasters related to climate change in Australia and globally. Presentation program (90 minutes) The symposium will have 6 presentations, 15 minutes each including Q&A. Names and short biography of presenters