A Biologic Approach to Environmental Assessment and Epidemiology

The ultimate goal of environmental health is the prevention of disease through identification and elimination of environmental hazards or the reduction of exposures, Exposure assessment and epidemiology are essential tools in progress towards this goal, but they are often taught and carried out separately. In this book, Thomas J. Smith and David Kriebel propose a set of four common biologic models of how disease develops over time in response to exposure. This synthesis of the various existing models serves to both simplify and improve the application of epidemiology and exposure assessment to current and future environmental chemical risks.

Their approach is illustrated for a variety of disease processes and types of environmental and occupational exposures. Through examples and clear explanation, the authors show how detailed mechanistic information from laboratory studies can be used to build and apply biologically-based exposure-response models. The models described here can provide a systematic approach for designing environmental and occupational epidemiologic studies and for exploiting new experimental results of toxicology, genomics and related fields.

With the rapid proliferation of molecular and cell biology, the mechanisms underlying pathologic processes leading to adverse health effects are increasingly well understood. This new knowledge should be used more systematically as the theoretical basis of exposure-response modeling. When exposure assessor and epidemiologist agree from the start on the underlying biologic model, the studies they design and the analyses they carry out are much more likely to yield useful information, resulting in better health for all.

Thomas J. Smith, Ph.D., is Professor of Industrial Hygiene in the Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health. He has more than 30 years of experience developing exposure assessments for health studies in a wide variety of occupational and environmental settings, including development of methods to estimate long-term past exposures for studies of cancer and chronic diseases, and exposure-based models of tissue dose and responses.
David Kriebel, SC. D., is Professor and Chair in the Department of Work Environment, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Dr. Kriebel is also Co-Director of the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production and is an environmental and occupational epidemiologist with 25 years of experience in the design and analysis of epidemiologic studies. He is a co-author, with Harvey Checkoway and Neil Pearce, of Research Methods in Occupational Epidemiology, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2004).