Perspective

The Diablo Analytical Institute provides scientific-based environmental and health services to organizations. DAI epidemiologic services can assist organizations in determining if their employees and/or service recipients have been exposed to higher ambient air pollution concentration levels and to long-term exposure to low-level ecological hazards in the workplace, and if, over time, this type of combined air pollution-ecological hazard exposure (environmental hazard) could be manifested as an adverse health outcome.

• DAI can identify environmental hazard exposed persons through the completion of one-on-one interviews, administration of surveys to groups of persons or through the Internet, ambient air pollution concentration level measurements, and ecological hazard concentration level assessment.

• Data linkage studies can quantify the strength of the association between initial environmental hazard exposure and the subsequent occurrence of adverse health outcomes.

• The successful implementation of organization-wide intervention programs can lower or prevent future exposure to environmental hazards and reverse some or all of the negative health outcomes due to prior air pollution and/or ecological hazard exposure.

DAI attempts to maximize the benefits derived from intervention programs by fully understanding known and suspected environmental hazard exposure-health outcome mechanisms.

Epidemiologic studies – surveillance, surveys, case-control, prospective, and linked environmental hazard exposure-health outcome analyses are included in the epidemiologic study design phase. Selected outcome measures provide additional information on how physiologic systems mediate the suspected or confirmed association between environmental hazard exposure and the adversely impacted health outcome. Similarly, current knowledge of environmental hazard-health outcome physiologic mechanisms are considered in the development of intervention procedures.

One benefit of DAI’s epidemiologic-intervention approach is the atypical health outcome measure selected for further study is more likely to be more generalizable beyond the study's unique circumstances, because, mechanistically, it is more physiologically (and biologically) meaningful.

DAI’s preference is to utilize general scientific and specific epidemiologic methods to identify factual information relevant to the organization's unique environmental hazard-health outcome problem under investigation.

Of course, results from published scientific papers are always included in the organization’s project design, execution, analyses, interpretations, recommendations, and proposed intervention. But the availability of an organization's project-specific factual profile contributes to a complete understanding of how and why some specific environmental hazards uniquely and adversely impact health outcomes of employees and customers.

Successful interventions confirm that the most appropriate environmental hazard-health outcome remediation method was selected to eliminate the environmental hazard produced health burden. In addition, supplemental assessments of intervention processes will add new information about the intervention – and provide an answer to the question, why it was successful?

For DAI, each new project is another opportunity to advance our understanding of environmental and public health principles as they apply to organizations. The ultimate aim is to use established and newly developed epidemiologic methods to improve the lives of persons adversely impacted through their exposure to environmental hazards – ambient air pollution with or without ecological hazards.