Neurobehavioral effects of sodium tungstate exposure on rats and their progeny.

The use of tungsten as a replacement for lead and depleted uranium in munitions began in the mid 1990's. Recent reports demonstrate tungsten solubilizes in soil and can migrate into drinking water supplies and therefore is a potential health risk to humans. This study evaluated the reproductive and neurobehavioral effects of sodium tungstate in Sprague-Dawley rats following 70 days of daily pre- and postnatal exposure. Adult male and female rats were orally dosed with diH(2)O vehicle, 5 or 125 mg/kg/day of sodium tungstate through mating, gestation, and weaning (PND 0-20). Daily administration of sodium tungstate produced no overt evidence of toxicity and had no apparent effect on mating success or offspring physical development. Distress vocalizations were elevated in the highest dose group. There was no treatment related effect on righting reflex latencies, however, the males had significantly shorter latencies than the females. Locomotor activity was affected in both the low and high dose groups of F0 females. Those in the low dose group showed increased distance traveled, more time in ambulatory movements, and less time in stereotypic behavior than controls or high dose animals. The high dose group had more time in stereotypical movements than controls, and less time resting than controls and the lowest exposure group. Maternal retrieval was not affected by sodium tungstate exposure and there were no apparent effects of treatment on F1 acoustic startle response or water maze navigation. Overall, the results of this study suggest pre- and postnatal oral exposure to sodium tungstate may produce subtle neurobehavioral effects in offspring related to motor activity and emotionality. These findings warrant further investigation to characterize the neurotoxicity of sodium tungstate on dams and their developing pups.

Using a partnership barometer to evaluate environmental public health tracking activities.

High-quality environmental health surveillance is challenged by a system in which environmental and health agencies often function with insufficient coordination to routinely address critical issues. The Environmental Public Health Tracking program is working to build a more cohesive system with the capacity for integrated data and information. This work requires a significant amount of effort dedicated to establishing strong partnerships between agencies. Such a task requires skills and activities that differ significantly from the more technical skills needed to physically link data and information from environmental and health resources. Although the work to link people is different from linking data, it is of primary importance because the development of strong partnerships almost invariably provides the necessary foundation for the future integration of data and expertise. As such, the development of partnerships between environmental and health agencies needs to be recognized as a priority product. One approach for moving partnerships into the fore is the creation of assessment tools, or "partnership barometers," that objectively quantify the collaborative process for monitoring progress between and within partners over time. Such measurement would provide a realistic indicator of progress toward tangible products but more importantly emphasizes the importance of building sustainable relationships.

Measuring the environmental health of Wisconsin's counties.

INTRODUCTION: Environmental factors-such as air and water pollution, lead exposure in homes, or aspects of urban design-influence the health of a community. Monitoring these environmental health influences is a core function of public health, making it necessary to identify critical priorities and effectively target outreach and intervention efforts. This paper reviews the methods used to develop a summary measure of the environmental health of Wisconsin's 72 counties and the city of Milwaukee. METHODS: We collected publicly available data on 9 indicators of environmental health, divided into 3 constructs-air quality, water quality, and the built environment. We looked at how the counties ranked in each construct and then combined the estimates into a summary measure of environmental health. We ranked the summary measure from lowest to highest risk, with higher representing a worse physical environment. RESULTS: In 2007, Wisconsin regions with major metropolitan areas had the worst environmental health risk. In contrast, the 10 counties with the best environmental health were all located in rural areas of the state. CONCLUSION: Publicly available data can be used to compare and contrast environmental health in Wisconsin's communities. Although the measures used to collect these data could be improved, the results can still be used in community health planning and improvement efforts.

Linking childhood cancer with potential environmental exposure determinants.

Childhood chronic diseases, especially cancer, are of growing concern. Research has focused on 2 developmental periods, prenatal and postnatal. While it is hypothesized that chemical contaminants in the physical environment may play a role in the development and exacerbation of many chronic diseases, the role of environmental exposures in the etiology of these conditions remains uncertain. This can be somewhat attributed to the fact that it is very difficult to efficiently link chronic health effects with environmental exposures that are likely to have occurred temporally and spatially distant from diagnosis. This study explored the utility of linking childhood cancer cases with their birth certificate data as a method for increasing the number of geo-referenced data points available for linking health effect data with environmental monitoring data. This would begin to quantify the transiency of 1 subset of the population, and provide a basis for characterizing and estimating potentials for exposure to numerous environmental contaminants during prenatal and postnatal periods. A total of 441 unduplicated cancer diagnosis records of children who were both born and diagnosed with cancer in Wisconsin between 1995 and 2002 were linked with birth records to explore the variability between address at birth and diagnosis. The majority of records were matched to a birth record file (81.0%). Of these matched records, 86% moved <1 mile from birth to time of diagnosis. The results suggest that administrative and public health surveillance data can be used to quantify transiency. Data from the sample tested indicate that during the given time period children do not move far from their birth homes, suggesting minimal changes in exposure potential related to residence location from birth to diagnosis. This background is useful for future epidemiological investigations linking environmental factors with chronic health effects.

Evaluation of five data sources for inclusion in a statewide tracking system for accidental carbon monoxide poisonings.

All accidental carbon monoxide poisoning should be preventable. Yet despite intervention efforts including promotion of inexpensive home carbon monoxide detectors, annual inspection of home gas and oil appliances, and general awareness campaigns, in 2002 there were 18 fatalities, 36 inpatient admissions, 351 emergency department visits and 117 poison center calls attributed to acute carbon monoxide exposure. The first step to help better focus public health interventions is adequate information on occurrences. The Wisconsin Environmental Public Health Tracking program identified and evaluated potential data sources for inclusion in a surveillance system for monitoring unintentional carbon monoxide poisonings. Criteria to evaluate the utility of the existing data systems were developed and included the number of new cases identified from that source, the circumstantial detail provided, timeliness of data availability, confidence that an actual exposure occurred, and the resources required to retrieve and summarize the data. Five candidate datasets were evaluated: emergency department visits, hospital inpatient stays, death certificates, Wisconsin Poison Center records, and newspaper reports. It was found that although there was some overlap between cases reported in the different datasets, each source provided unique cases. The sources also differed in the resources required for utilizing the data and the amount of circumstantial information provided. Based on the evaluation of the different sources, it was concluded that newspaper reports should not be included, but the other 4 data sources would each contribute substantially to establishing a comprehensive surveillance system for accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.

Wisconsin's environmental public health tracking network: information systems design for childhood cancer surveillance.

In this article we describe the development of an information system for environmental childhood cancer surveillance. The Wisconsin Cancer Registry annually receives more than 25,000 incident case reports. Approximately 269 cases per year involve children. Over time, there has been considerable community interest in understanding the role the environment plays as a cause of these cancer cases. Wisconsin's Public Health Information Network (WI-PHIN) is a robust web portal integrating both Health Alert Network and National Electronic Disease Surveillance System components. WI-PHIN is the information technology platform for all public health surveillance programs. Functions include the secure, automated exchange of cancer case data between public health-based and hospital-based cancer registrars; web-based supplemental data entry for environmental exposure confirmation and hypothesis testing; automated data analysis, visualization, and exposure-outcome record linkage; directories of public health and clinical personnel for role-based access control of sensitive surveillance information; public health information dissemination and alerting; and information technology security and critical infrastructure protection. For hypothesis generation, cancer case data are sent electronically to WI-PHIN and populate the integrated data repository. Environmental data are linked and the exposure-disease relationships are explored using statistical tools for ecologic exposure risk assessment. For hypothesis testing, case-control interviews collect exposure histories, including parental employment and residential histories. This information technology approach can thus serve as the basis for building a comprehensive system to assess environmental cancer etiology.

An evaluation of neurobehavioral tests used to assess the neurodevelopmental effects of early ammonium perchlorate exposure.

Perchlorate is an anion known to interfere with normal production of thyroid hormones that are integrally involved in the development of the central nervous system and neurobehavioral capacities. Given the identification of drinking water contamination with perchlorate, there are efforts to investigate the effects of exposure in developing fetuses and children in order to guide the establishment of regulatory standards. Systematic neurobehavioral investigations in animal models have been completed to evaluate neurodevelopmental consequences of exposures at different concentrations in drinking water. However, these investigations have not directly addressed the public concern for increased incidences of childhood attention deficit disorders, autism, and lowered IQs of children in areas with known contamination. Although epidemiological data suggest there is not a relationship between drinking-water perchlorate exposure and these childhood disorders, it may be prudent to use animal models to systematically assess the potential for such problems. Given the behavioral complexity of these problems, an appropriate evaluation will require the use of nontraditional neurobehavioral tests such as operant conditioning tasks of varying levels of complexity, and juvenile rat play. Such tests will provide a more direct evaluation of the potential for attention deficits, autism, and lowered IQ scores related to thyroid hormone disruption due to early perchlorate exposure.

Human brain EEG indices of emotions: delineating responses to affective vocalizations by measuring frontal theta event-related synchronization.

At present there is no direct brain measure of basic emotional dynamics from the human brain. EEG provides non-invasive approaches for monitoring brain electrical activity to emotional stimuli. Event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS) analysis, based on power shifts in specific frequency bands, has some potential as a method for differentiating responses to basic emotions as measured during brief presentations of affective stimuli. Although there appears to be fairly consistent theta ERS in frontal regions of the brain during the earliest phases of processing affective auditory stimuli, the patterns do not readily distinguish between specific emotions. To date it has not been possible to consistently differentiate brain responses to emotion-specific affective states or stimuli, and some evidence to suggests the theta ERS more likely measures general arousal processes rather than yielding veridical indices of specific emotional states. Perhaps cortical EEG patterns will never be able to be used to distinguish discrete emotional states from the surface of the brain. The implications and limitations of such approaches for understanding human emotions are discussed.

Validation of a novel social investigation task that may dissociate social motivation from exploratory activity.

The present series of studies provide validation of a new paradigm that uniquely combines the assessment of the propensity to engage in social investigation with measures of (nonsocial) exploratory activity in rats. Assessment of this social investigation paradigm indicated that (a) rats showed a robust preference for social investigation over nonsocial exploratory activity, (b) female rats showed a greater preference for social investigation than male rats, (c) no signs of habituation in these responses were observed when rats were tested once daily for 4 consecutive days, (d) the preference for social investigation was stable and robust in both the dark and light periods of the daily light cycle for 5 consecutive days, and (e) testing under bright light conditions suppressed social investigation. In addition, acute administration of opiate drugs, low dose morphine (1.0 mg/kg) and naltrexone (1.0 mg/kg) produced a more robust attenuation of social investigation than nonsocial exploratory activity. Amphetamine increased both forms of investigation and haloperidol had the opposite effect, but the overall preference for social investigation over exploratory activity remained largely intact after both amphetamine and haloperidol injection. Together, these findings validate the use of this behavioral task to assess changes in social-motivation and general exploratory activity. Importantly, the task is bi-directionally sensitive to subject characteristics (i.e., sex), drug manipulations which modulate social motivation, and environmental manipulations.

Use of health information in air pollution health research: past successes and emerging needs.

In September 2006, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) co-organized a symposium on "Air Pollution Exposure and Health." The main objective of this symposium was to identify opportunities for improving the use of exposure and health information in future studies of air pollution health effects. This paper deals with the health information needs of such studies. We begin with a selected review of different types of health data and how they were used in previous epidemiologic studies of health effects of ambient particulate matter (PM). We then examine the current and emerging information needs of the environmental health community, dealing with PM and other air pollutants of health concern. We conclude that the past use of routinely collected health data proved to be essential for activities to protect public health, including the identification and evaluation of health hazards by air pollution research, setting standards for criteria pollutants, surveillance of health outcomes to identify incidence trends, and the more recent CDC environmental public health tracking program. Unfortunately, access to vital statistics records that have informed such pivotal research has recently been curtailed sharply, threatening the continuation of the type of research necessary to support future standard setting and research on emerging exposure and health problems (e.g. asthma, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and others), as well as our ability to evaluate the efficacy of regulatory and other prevention activities. A comprehensive devoted effort, perhaps new legislation, will be needed to address the standardization, centralization, and sharing of data sets, as well as to harmonize the interpretation of confidentiality and privacy protections across jurisdictions. These actions, combined with assuring researchers and public health practitioners appropriate access to data for evaluation of environmental risks, will be essential for the achievement of our environmental health protection goals.

Refining the effects observed in a developmental neurobehavioral study of ammonium perchlorate administered orally in drinking water to rats. II. Behavioral and neurodevelopment effects.

A developmental neurotoxicity study was conducted to generate additional data on the potential functional and morphological hazard to the central nervous system caused by ammonium perchlorate in offspring from in utero and lactation exposure. Female Sprague-Dawley rats (23 to 25/group) were given continuous access to 0 (carrier), 0.1, 1.0, 3.0, and 10.0 mg/kg-day perchlorate in the drinking water beginning 2 weeks prior to mating and continuing through day 10 of lactation for the behavioral function assessment or given continuous access to 0 (carrier), 0.1, 1.0, 3.0, and 30.0 mg/kg-day beginning on gestation day 0 and continuing through day 10 of lactation for neurodevelopment assessments. Motor activity was conducted on postpartum days 14, 18, and 22 and juvenile brain weights, neurohistopathological examinations, and regional brain morphometry were conducted on postpartum days 10 and 22. This research revealed a sexually dimorphic response, with some brain regions being larger in perchlorate-treated male rats than in comparable controls. Even so, there was no evidence of any obvious exposure-related effects on male rat brain weights or neuropathology. The most consistent exposure-related effect in the male pups was on the thickness of the corpus callosum, with both the right- and left-sided measures of the thickness of this white matter tract being significantly greater for the male pups in the 0.1 and 1.0 mg/kg-day exposure groups. The behavioral testing suggests prenatal exposure to ammonium perchlorate does not affect the development of gross motor movements in the pups.

Biological and health effects of exposure to kerosene-based jet fuels and performance additives.

Over 2 million military and civilian personnel per year (over 1 million in the United States) are occupationally exposed, respectively, to jet propulsion fuel-8 (JP-8), JP-8 +100 or JP-5, or to the civil aviation equivalents Jet A or Jet A-1. Approximately 60 billion gallon of these kerosene-based jet fuels are annually consumed worldwide (26 billion gallon in the United States), including over 5 billion gallon of JP-8 by the militaries of the United States and other NATO countries. JP-8, for example, represents the largest single chemical exposure in the U.S. military (2.53 billion gallon in 2000), while Jet A and A-1 are among the most common sources of nonmilitary occupational chemical exposure. Although more recent figures were not available, approximately 4.06 billion gallon of kerosene per se were consumed in the United States in 1990 (IARC, 1992). These exposures may occur repeatedly to raw fuel, vapor phase, aerosol phase, or fuel combustion exhaust by dermal absorption, pulmonary inhalation, or oral ingestion routes. Additionally, the public may be repeatedly exposed to lower levels of jet fuel vapor/aerosol or to fuel combustion products through atmospheric contamination, or to raw fuel constituents by contact with contaminated groundwater or soil. Kerosene-based hydrocarbon fuels are complex mixtures of up to 260+ aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbon compounds (C(6) -C(17+); possibly 2000+ isomeric forms), including varying concentrations of potential toxicants such as benzene, n-hexane, toluene, xylenes, trimethylpentane, methoxyethanol, naphthalenes (including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons [PAHs], and certain other C(9)-C(12) fractions (i.e., n-propylbenzene, trimethylbenzene isomers). While hydrocarbon fuel exposures occur typically at concentrations below current permissible exposure limits (PELs) for the parent fuel or its constituent chemicals, it is unknown whether additive or synergistic interactions among hydrocarbon constituents, up to six performance additives, and other environmental exposure factors may result in unpredicted toxicity. While there is little epidemiological evidence for fuel-induced death, cancer, or other serious organic disease in fuel-exposed workers, large numbers of self-reported health complaints in this cohort appear to justify study of more subtle health consequences. A number of recently published studies reported acute or persisting biological or health effects from acute, subchronic, or chronic exposure of humans or animals to kerosene-based hydrocarbon fuels, to constituent chemicals of these fuels, or to fuel combustion products. This review provides an in-depth summary of human, animal, and in vitro studies of biological or health effects from exposure to JP-8, JP-8 +100, JP-5, Jet A, Jet A-1, or kerosene.