Welcome to Buffalo HealthCast

Vennela Damarla: 0:00

Hi. Welcome to Buffalo HealthCast. This is Vennela Damarla, Podcast Producer. Today we have Dr Michael Shelley, a seasoned environmental economist with over 25 years of global experience. Dr Shelley is a research assistant professor at UB's RENEW Institute specializing in environmental impact analysis, recycling and the economics of sustainability. His work has shaped projects ranging from climate change mitigation to valuing ecosystem services, and he is passionate about preparing future leader in this critical field. We are excited to hear his insight on environmental economics and sustainability. Thank you so much Dr Michael Shelly for joining us today.

Dr. Michael Shelly: 0:48

Well, thank you for hosting me.

Vennela Damarla: 0:50

Thank you, so let me start with the first questions. Can you share what inspired you to pursue a career in environmental economics and how your experience on five continents shape your perspective on sustainability.

Dr. Michael Shelly: 1:06

Okay, well, to tackle the first one, I ended up in environmental economics, sort of by accident. I started going out with a young lady in London many years ago who later became my wife, and it turned out she worked in environmental consulting, an environmental company, consulting company, and I got a job there too. And since I was an economist, I ended up doing environmental economics. So I ended up learning a lot about environmental economics through working on the job. Thing about sustainability is really about balancing two things. One is human welfare. In other words, people, how well people are living and and the environment, or the biosphere, you're sort of like trying to manage that relationship. So when I went to China, for instance, back in the 1990s there was still the viewpoint that smoking chimneys were a sign of prosperity. And I said, this was a good thing. Back here in the richer countries, there had been a movement to try and stop economic growth. It's very much a big concern about stopping economic growth because it was damaging the planet. And back in the 1970s when this view was very current over here, the people living in the not so rich countries, they sort of rebelled against this idea. They said, so you know, we were pretty poor, and you're telling us that growth has got to end. Does that mean we always have to stay poor? We would like to have the same opportunities as you? So that's where the whole Sustainable Development idea came from. And it's a little more possible to understand it if you've seen it from the perspective of some of the poorer countries who wish to raise the living standard of their people than it is from over here, where we're already pretty rich. And so the idea of ending economic growth and such like, it doesn't seem so bad to us. So that's how it affected me, also different concerns of different places. So when I teach course, when I teach students about pollution and air pollution and such like, here in the United States, I always have to begin with pictures of how it used to be here, 50 years ago, because that you don't see pollution in the United States. You don't the air isn't orange or, you know, so thick that you can't see across the street. You don't have streams that have got, like, greasy sheens on them, full of plastic and garbage. You don't really see that very much. You used to. You don't see it now. So so different parts of the world have very different view and what's meant by sustainability. So anyway, long answer, short.

Vennela Damarla: 3:37

Yes, that's an interesting story. Dr Shelley, question, yeah. So moving on to next question, with over 25 years in the field, how has the role of environmental economist evolved, particularly with the raise of climate change awareness?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 3:52

Oh, it's changed a lot. Push going back to my earlier answer in the 19 early 1990s when I first started getting into this, the concern was very much about what they call conventional they call conventional pollutants. That would be your particulate matter in the air. That would be sulfur dioxide nitrous dioxides, it would also be water pollution, because they were seen as most immediate threat. But the science on climate change has moved on, and we now see that as the bigger threat, that and a loss of biodiversity. They're now seen as the two big, big areas.

Vennela Damarla: 4:27

Okay, thank you. Dr Shelley, that was very insightful to know. So you have mentioned a lot about the projects, ongoing project, how the climate change is 20 years back. So what role that environmental economist have. Do you think that they might play a critical role in this aspects?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 4:47

This idea of an externality. An externality is where I do something and it harms you in and I don't. Have to pay a cost for it. So for instance, if I'm driving a big diesel truck for an urban neighborhood, I'm going to be pushing out particulates, and I'm going to be causing health problems for people who live along that road. But I receive, I have no cons. It's no consequence to me. I don't have to pay a bill for it. I don't get told off for it. I don't get fined, it's no consequence to me. And one of the things we find with human behavior is that if we don't have to face the consequences of our own behavior, we will tend to overdo the damaging behavior. So one of the things the environment economics gives you is the idea where you're imposing a cost on someone. So it's one thing to say, Oh, I can't afford to change something, but then you should ask the other question, well, if you're harming people, what do you propose? How do you propose to reduce the harm you're causing? And so with climate change is a classic example. So we see that say certain Pacific islands are now worried that sea level is going to rise and engulf the entire island. They have to move away. We see terrific droughts in other parts of the world. We saw floods in Pakistan not so long ago, which were attributed to climate change. So we're imposing costs, enough that we don't have to bear any of those costs. Well, bear much of those costs, so we just ignore them. So one thing that the environmental economics does is it allows you to put things on the other side instead of I have to justify to you why you have to cut your pollution. I ask you, well, how can you justify harming people? You know, what are you going to do about it? So that's, I think it's probably one most important idea.

Vennela Damarla: 6:38

Yeah, thank you so much, Dr Shelley for simplifying it and then making us understand what actually Environmental Economics does and moving on to next question. At the Renew Institute, you focus on plastics and tire recycling, among other topics, what are some recent advancements or challenges in this area that you find particularly impactful?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 7:00

Okay, so we don't do much recycling. Only about 8% of the plastic in United States is recycled, as I recall, and we don't really recycle tires. So using that argument about or that idea of the externality, we have to ask the question, What harm does my consumption of plastics and tires have on other people? What consequences Am I not paying for, and are they sufficiently large that I should change my behavior? And that an answer that varies in different parts of the world. So in the poorer countries of the world, they have a problem with trash collection. So things tend to get discarded into the environment. You know, when you hear about the all those bits of plastic floating in the Pacific, and you hear about the garbage past a lot that's actually come from that would be the sort of the Asian side of the Pacific, because they don't have particularly good garbage control. And it gets into the rivers and then gets washed out to sea. United States, we don't have the problem with the garbage so much. What we have a problem with is more than micro plastics. This is where plastic, some plastics do get released into the environment, and they get into small pieces. And we're finding that animals were affected by we're affected by and we've got bits of plastic. But as an economist, I didn't say, Okay, what's the substitute? If I'm not going to buy a plastic bottle of water, what's the substitute? Well, maybe we get people to renew, to change their containers, but then the incentives are all wrong. What I mean by that is that the reason we, for instance, went over from glass to plastic is because glass is more expensive to produce, so it's cheap to produce plastics, and we can make plastics very cheap. That's the problem with plastics. They're also likely to get relatively cheaper, because as we stop burning oil and gas for to produce energy for cars and heat in our homes, and all the rest of the producers of those substances are going to want to find another market, and so they're building big plastic plants at the moment to produce more plastic they want us to produce if you use more plastic.

Vennela Damarla: 9:08

So you think banning plastics would make any difference.

Dr. Michael Shelly: 9:13

Always, certainly make a difference. The thing is, what would we use as a substitute? So if we were to use glass, the glass is very energy intensive material. It's also heavy, and it would, and so therefore we'd end up using more energy. On the other hand, we might go over to more reusable containers. So sometimes, like with Starbucks, I used to have a reusable cup, and I'd go back, and then they started telling me, Well, for hygiene reasons, we can't take your cup back. So, you know, so I could, couldn't use the reusable cup. So we would have to change other behaviors as well to make these changes. Yeah,

Vennela Damarla: 9:44

Okay, your research also includes studying the social burden of power outages. Could you elaborate on this issue and its broader implications for sustainability?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 9:55

The thing is that in in the richer countries, by. Our constant access to power is just a given. We just expect it. We built our lives around it. So if, for some reason, the power is cut, the electricity is cut off, it has bad impacts. So you really don't want that to happen now, as it's as a utility or somebody's looking to invest, you have to look at the benefits of an investment, and sometimes some of those benefits aren't expressed in market. Prices. Nowhere. There is no market. There is no you can't say, oh, this costs them $25 or whatever. Data isn't there. So what we've been doing is we've been interviewing people Texas and Puerto Rico, and we've been asking them about recent power, just recent to them. And so we would ask them, Well, how did it affect your ability to do this? You know, like to cook, your ability to communicate how much extra money, how much extra time and such like. And we try to find out how much harm it does to people to have their power cut off. And that can help to guide investment decisions. There is this idea that there are certain groups in society that would be most likely damaged, and you can easily identify them. We're finding that's not so easy to do so, so you have to basically do a survey, and you figure out sort of people who are harmed. And so we've been finding things like, it's people with children, it's between five and 17, it's people who live in rented accommodation. That should be a very big predictor of how much burden you're going to have.

Vennela Damarla: 11:36

Okay, so how does your work with the UB carbon pricing group contribute to regional or global climate change mitigation of efforts. Okay,

Dr. Michael Shelly: 11:47

So putting up. Economists are very keen on putting the price on carbon because they're trying to capture that externality. They're trying to say, Well, if you emit a ton of CO two, although you may not be aware of it you're actually causing. Say, I think the late assessment is about $130 of damage around the world for each time you emit. So the idea is, if people have to face the prices for these if that's built into the price, that will change their behavior. What they'll do is they'll reduce consumption, or reduce activities produce greenhouse gasses or and they might switch. So for instance, somebody, if we put a higher price on gasoline to reflect it's the damage it's causing that might encourage people to go over to to an electric car. So that's, that's the idea. So you'd be wanting to do this. It's, it's hard to do within an organization, because we don't really have prices. If I if you announce to a certain department that you're going to now hit them with a bill for their energy use, there would be a lot of resistance, but also they would ask the question, well, what can I do to change it? So one of the things you have to do in designing a carbon price is you have to make sure the person who's bearing the price actually has the ability to change things. So with UB, we don't, you and I or department has don't have the ability to change the heating source. That has to be bad building by building. So it's more of a UB level thing. Yes, and and UB is already moving to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by switching its energy consumption. So that's good, and so eventually you won't have to price it, because already COVID Reduce it so that say, yes,

Vennela Damarla: 13:30

yeah. So moving on to next question. You employ diverse methodologies such as life cycle assessment and cost benefit analysis. Could you walk us through how this approaches inform decision making in environmental projects?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 13:47

Okay, I don't do so much of the life cycle analysis. Obviously. Do that. I do. I've done the cost benefit. I teach cost benefit. Cost Benefit is a way of pulling the all the information together in order to make a decision. So what I would typically do when I was working in consulting was I would do the environmental cost benefit analysis of projects in in places like China and Morocco. And what my role was, sometimes, I'd have to do the financial analysis, which looking at the costs that companies actually pay out of pocket, you know, for energy, labor and all the rest, and put together a balance, balance, what they call pro forma balance sheets and income statements and such that it's not really my specialty, but sometimes how to do it, but I used it, but it was my specialty, was to take into account these externalities. So if, for instance, we were going to build or the Asian Development Bank or the World Bank was going to build a water treatment plant that would have health benefits, right so people now drinking health or clean water, there will be less cases of illness, maybe fewer deaths. And we would try and estimate, using literature values, how many extra cases of or how many cases of illness were prevented, how many deaths. Were prevented, we put a value on those, and we would typically use it again, literature values, because extremely expensive do your own studies, and World Bank and Asian development bank wouldn't pay the money required to do that. So you just use values from the literature. And then we would build those in. So it would make projects that improve public health, through improving the environment, would make them much more attractive. Projects where it was like we worked one, one which was a coke oven in China, make them much less attractive because they'd be generating a lot of pollution. And sometimes you get the strange situation where, with the coke oven, we were going to replace an old one with a new one, and the new one were much less polluting. So there's actually an environmental benefit in the sense of reduction in harm from moving to the newer technology. So I would work that out. Then we'd look at that over time, you know how it occur over time? And then we would discount it, would take the present value of that and bring it back. That would go into a report, which the World Bank and Asian Development Bank boards would then review. And so what would happen with environmental projects, sometimes is in terms of the financial side of things, it may not look like it's very good, because the cost would be greater than the financial benefits, but once you added in the environmental benefits, it became very beneficial, so I would obviously capture those costs that aren't captured the financial analysis, because they relate to externalities.

Vennela Damarla: 16:31

Okay,can you share an example where valuing ecosystem services using willingness to pay methods led to actionable insights?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 16:40

Well, yeah, some examples have come to mind. Just before I joined UB, I was working on some projects related to the impacts of oil spills. And the way that one went was, I think, in an example, some refuge the refugee beach spill in California in the mid 2010 there an offshore pipeline ruptured, as I recall, and oil came ashore, and people couldn't use the beach. So the question came, well, how much compensation should the pipeline company give to the state of California to compensate people for that lack of access to the natural resources. The way that was valued was a survey was done over the internet of people at Arsen where they went to in California. So we'd what they did was they would click on all the site they have a map, and they click on all places they visit, say when they visited, and they were to give some information about themselves, where they lived, and their income and such like. And from that, you could deduce a few things. You could deduce how much it cost them to get to an area, like in terms of the travel costs, and in terms of how much time they had to give up, and there's value to time. So we'd work that out. And then you would look at how the visitation rates were depended upon both their income and how far they had to travel and the characteristics of these various areas they went to. So I my particular job was to get all the information about the characteristics of all these alternative beach sites for people go to in California. Another I was also involved in hiring a helicopter pilot whose job was to fly 300 meters out, 100 meters up from from the coastline, and fly along every day and take pictures. And from that, we could figure out how many people were using the beach. This was, this is a year or two after spill, some people back using the beach. So we can get a sense of what the baseline visitation rate is. We would use all this information in a statistical model to figure out how many visits would go to a site, and how that was affected by its distance from people, the characteristics of that site and other sites they might go to. And then you could put a value on features of an area, like how big the beach is, how nice the view is, whether it's got picnic area, you know, this sort of thing. And you could figure out, if I added, if I had a site that didn't have, like, a picnic area, if I added the picnic area, how many extra visits would I get? So now you go back and you say, Okay, I've done my helicopter flight. I figured out how many people should have been using the beach on a good day. I know nobody was. I figured out how many trips are lost, and then looking forward to say, okay, the beach is now clear and restored, and it's looking okay. But you owe me, the pipeline company. You owe me or the state of California for all those visits that did not happen. So you need to do something to generate more visits to the to these sites in the future. So we have figured out from our model that these amenities at these sites will generate enough extra visits to compensate for the visits that were lost when you boiled the beach. So. So new, the pipeline company now have to pay for those you have to pay for the bike path, you have to pay for the picnic area. You have to pay for like, maybe put more sand on the beach. And that's, that's how we use environment economics to get at people's valuation of not only the natural things, but the things that we can control, like the amenities at the site. And what we do is we, what we did was we made the pipeline, we made the claim against the pipeline coming to make them change some of the characteristics of sites to increase number of visits to offset the loss.

Vennela Damarla: 20:28

Yeah, it was very interesting to know all this factor come under consideration when you're deciding cost benefit analysis. Okay, moving on to next question, how do you incorporate habitat equivalency analysis in your project? And why is this method particularly useful for environmental impact studies?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 20:49

Okay, habitat equivalence analysis is something similar to what I just talked about. So if there's a pollution incident of some kind, then one of the first things that happens as part of a natural resource damage assessment processes, the ecologists will go out and they will figure out how much damage there is. They compare what's there after pollution compared to what should have been there. It's called the baseline. And they look at the trajectory of the damage. In other words, would it get better by itself? Will it not get better by itself? And then there'll be some remediation, but it might, but there's been a loss of of those natural resource services in a period when it was damaged, and there might be some continuing loss if we can't completely repair the damage. So in situations where a state or federal entity owns the land on behalf of the American people, there will be a law or there was, there will be a case before the court is going under the natural resource damage assessment process. And what we'll do then is just like I talked about how we would improve the beach areas, well, we will talk about, how can we improve that area. So I worked on a on an instance of this in the Middle East, back in 1990 91 Iraq released oil into the Arabian Gulf, Persian Gulf, and this damaged the beaches in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. And so we developed, my company, developed a claim against Iraq on behalf of these two countries for nature preserves. The idea is we take a pair of pieces of the beach that had not previously been protected. We would protect it. We would then have biologists there to make sure it was stayed in a good condition. We'd have visitor centers. We'd have a research lab and things like this. And we would say this, you know, we've improved the service of the area. We've approved the access of the people to natural resource services. And then we sent the bill through the United Nations Compensation Commission to Iraq, there was a settlement, and Iraq ended up funding these, these nature preserves, coastal nature preserves,

Vennela Damarla: 22:51

Yes, okay, so environmental economist, it's not just restricted to Just giving the claims or giving the cost benefit analysis. It's like you take a lot of factor under considerations in order to give the cost benefit analysis. Okay, moving on to next question. You worked on high profile cases like assessing natural resource damage after the Gulf War. What lessons did you learn from this experience that inform your work today.

Dr. Michael Shelly: 23:22

Okay, so I've worked on a number of aspects of that, but one that's most relevant to UB is that I was part of the team that developed a health claim resulting from the Gulf War from 1990 to 91 on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And this had a UB component. There's a person called Dr Richard Lee from UB who was a member, leading member of the team. There were two parts of the team that work on the health claim. There was the epidemiological quantification team, I think you would call it. They were. Their job was to quantify the number of cases of illness and mortality arising from the air pollution from all these from a burning oil wells in Kuwait that the plume came over Saudi Arabia. So that was Dr Richard Lee, and he was working in conjunction with the Bloomberg, Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, guy called Samit John summit led their team, and they organized a massive surveys Saudi Arabia, household survey, when I went around and asked people about their health, and asked them about whether their health had been affected by the smoke plumes. And so they developed estimates of the additional number of cases of things like lung problems, heart problems, etc, etc. I was my team's evaluation team, and our task was to put a value on all these extra cases. And this was not easy, because Saudi Arabia has a public health system where they don't actually charge people. So Dr Lee and his team. Came up with number of cases, and then we multiplied them by the prices that we had developed, and the claim that came out to be $18 billion back in 2005

Vennela Damarla: 25:08

That's a really huge amount. And then it seems like a very complex process, because, and there is a lot of work that had to be done.

Dr. Michael Shelly: 25:18

Oh yeah, we, you know, until the last minute. We didn't we pull it off. I can remember going over to going over to Saudi Arabia. We were flying through London. I had one of my team members, and he said to his we're going. I said, I know that you can get this done. And I said, Well, we've got no we've got no other plan, so we better get it done. And we did much get done, mostly because of the hard work of my colleagues.

Vennela Damarla: 25:37

Yeah, it just seems like because here it's easy because we have insurance, and then there are so many such resources available where, like you said, that's a huge task, considering there are no insurance, and then you have to start everything right from step one, Yeah. How long did it take for you to to come

Dr. Michael Shelly: 25:53

and that's what made difficult, because obviously there were other people involved in this process, so The Columbia School of Public Health was hired by the United Nations to sort of look at our claims. And of course, they had huge questions about the survey. And could you actually survey into conclusion that, or to make an estimate of the amount that people then about 10 years, 12 years after the event, and get meaningful answers? They had a health economist who was was so I don't know if it's the right way to value these things. So there was a lot of arguing back and forth, typically in the environmental claims, not the health ones, but the environmental claims. What this process would result in in quite getting 10 cents on the dollar. In other words, they get about 10 cents for every dollar they claimed. That was just the way it seemed to work out. you have mentioned, $8 billion.

Dr. Michael Shelly: 26:47

Beginning to from beginning to end, it was probably about seven months.

Vennela Damarla: 26:52

Okay, that's, that's actually very long, yeah. Moving on to next question. Your work spans both natural and engineered system. What are the unique economic and environmental trade offs when working in these two domains? Well, every engineering project like a wastewater treatment plant or a water supply or a road or anything has an environmental consequence, so you have to trade off the benefits and the cost. So you have to say to yourself, how much benefit do we get from, say, a wastewater treatment plant compared to its cost? And so we have to, we have to look all these trade offs, and we have to ask ourselves, once you take into account the wider social implications of project? Is it worthwhile so? And usually it is. So I've done this on a minor scale. When the EPA in this country looks at changes in health regulations, you know, especially air pollution, they will look at the health benefits. And health benefits, by the way, are the largest single benefit, when you do it in dollar terms, benefit component, any cost benefit analysis, and they're nearly always so large with these things that they more than dwarf the costs. So when you get so and one of the things that always, I think is wrong is that whenever say EPA, that says it's going to tighten up regulations you'll get the industries will complain about, oh, we can't afford the extra cost and this. So the reporters will ask, you know, the EPA. Oh, of the government, how can you impose these costs on people? They say they're going to move their industries bubble, but they really need to ask another question, which is, of the people who are doing the pollution, they're going to get regulated. How can you justify continuing things as you're doing them, when you now know the health costs of all your activities, don't you think that maybe you should change your behavior, right? So you've got to put the, you've got to put the put it on the other thought. You've got to put it on the other party. Yes. So what advice would you give to students or young professionals aiming to make a meaningful impact in the field of sustainability?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 29:09

Well, first of all, come to you because we've got a great sustainability course. I think what you're going to find once you get out the university is going to find that you're going to struggle to come into people. These things are important. It's not top of the mind priority because we're not aware of it. It's that externality thing again. So whereas in the 1960s 1970s it would be no problem getting someone in America to be to talk about pollution. Now it's harder to do so because it's far off and they're not quite sure they're rolling it and such that. So you can have struggle to get people's attention. Also, you've got to concentrate on what you need to achieve and why you need to achieve it. So that's where some of this cost benefit analysis, and let's think about externalities. So what can a company actually achieve? What can. Do, what's the benefit of doing such a such a thing? And often you're going to be in a situation where there isn't a financial benefit to the company. So you're gonna have to persuade people, and then you're gonna have to counter old ideas. You're not gonna get people. You're gonna have to deal with the doomsters, the ones who think the world is coming to an end, and you're gonna have to deal with the other people who think there's no problem. So you're gonna have to, sort of, you're gonna have to do a role of educating people to get a sense of what you can do and why you should do it.

Vennela Damarla: 30:27

Well, that's the biggest part what you can do and what you should do, yeah. I mean, you really have to make people understand why that is really important,

Dr. Michael Shelly: 30:36

Yeah. And it may not be obvious. That's not because the sectionality thing,

Vennela Damarla: 30:39

Yes. So from an economist point of view. What are the most significant policy or market changes needed to accelerate sustainability practices globally?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 30:51

The biggest changes we go on, we look at, look at, start with climate change. Biggest thing there is we need to move away from fossil fuels. We need to do it fast. We have the technology to do it. We just don't want to do it, and so we have really got to figure out how to do that. I've been thinking about this, and I see an analogy between and I sound strange, but between the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and smoking. The social norm has changed, and it was no one thing that did. It was a whole public education effort which people at UB were involved in. And we need the same sort of thing with climate change. It's just not at the top of people's minds, and it's more difficult with climate change, because the harm that you'd you know, the balance of the harm, is much more to other people than to yourself. So you can tell the smoker where you know you're smoking and, you know, make yourself sick. But you can also affect other people, but where it's going to affect them, that's really direct, right? But with climate change, it's not going to have much of an impact. You know, if there's 100% of harm, you're only going to get 1% of it. Everybody else is going to get the remaining 99% so it's a harder deal, but we need that public education. We need to bring it to the point where people ask themselves, oh, you know what, I'm I'm going to if I do this, I'm going to end up emitting more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, almost this, this climate change issue is almost like a public health issue. We need to educate the public about the harms of their behavior. It's behavioral change is going to be key to this. So I think there's a synergy there with the Public Health Health Department,

Vennela Damarla: 32:29

Yes, so you have mentioned that we have to stop fossil fuels as immediate. I mean, immediate action has to be taken. We do have resources. But you have also mentioned that you told nobody is really making any action to change about it.

Dr. Michael Shelly: 32:47

There's action, but it's not sufficient. Okay.

Vennela Damarla: 32:51

Okay, so what do you think we should do more in order to do reduce that?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 32:57

Well, on a on a personal level, what we can do, especially in the democracies, is we can start to take this as an issue that we have to take responsibility for, and we vote accordingly. So we wouldn't vote for people who don't intend to take action. We would tend to favor the person who would take action. But that, as I say, requires us to take on a certain personal responsibility. So that's the education part of it, that's probably the most important thing.

Vennela Damarla: 33:24

So yes, that's true. Moving on to our next question, having worked across diverse geographies and industries, what motivates you to continue pushing boundaries in your research and teaching?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 33:37

Well, it's curiosity, really. I mean, you just get led by curiosity and also concern about issues, as I keep mentioning, climate change bias. These are these are these are costs we're imposing on future generations, and sometimes it's hard to change our ways to to reduce those costs, but sometimes it's easy. And I think we have to bear in mind that we we don't want to be complacent about future generations and pass with, like passing the bill to somebody else, just like sitting down at a restaurant having a nice meal, and then passing the bill to the this to another person, and just walking away. They were sort of, we're sort of doing that with just the future generations. So we're getting all the benefit and they get the bill. So we've got to, so that's what, that's what sort of drives me on I think we've got to change that. It's it's proving to be a frustratingly slow process, because I don't think it's as individuals, enough of us are actually taking this as a priority or even something we need to think about. I joke with my friends that if we worried as much about these issues as we worry about what we're going to have for dinner tonight, we would have this solved. Yes.

Vennela Damarla: 34:48

Can you share your thoughts on future of carbon markets and their potential to drive global decarbonization

Dr. Michael Shelly: 34:56

Carbon markets where they've traditionally with this two. Sorts. There's one is where you have some big polluters like power plants, and you get a what I call a cap and trade program, which is where the regulator uses the government will set a cap a total amount of greenhouse gasses that can be emitted in a year. And typically, what they'll do is they'll make that work. They will. They'll make this come down over time and industry when it's going to produce greenhouse gasses, has to go and buy an allowance for every ton, and those allowances going to be less and less every year, because the price, because the cap is going down, and the government's going to issue fewer allowances. So what happens then is the price to industry of buying those allowances goes up, so the price of pollutant goes up. So that's one example of car market, and that's worked quite well as worked well in Europe. They've got one in California. Issue with those typically is, is that the politicians don't wish to make the price too high. They get a lot of pushback from industry because some people don't like buying taxes, and so they've been a little too modest in their demands. Both the European system seems to be working. Then the other way you can get carbon markets is when you have a situation where one part of the world has to reduce its greenhouse gasses. In another part of world isn't under an obligation to do so. Another industry, perhaps isn't under an obligation to do so, but they do so anyhow, and then they get paid to do it. So for instance, if we had a situation where there was a country that was thinking about a poor country that was thinking about electrifying its system, and they could buy a coal fired power plant, or they could put in maybe solar panels and wind, and more expensive to solar panels and wind, if they did that and reduce greenhouse gasses, even though I didn't have to. Maybe someone, a regulated industry from the richer country might pay for those reductions, might pay them some money and then take the benefit back home, saying, hey, not only did I reduce my own pollution here in the United States, I also reduce pollution in that country over there, and I get some I should get some benefit. I can count that towards my pollution reduction. Those are two any the first sort of been working quite well. The second sort had where it's where you might have entities in different countries, or you might have one regulated industry and one not regulated industry that has not worked so well, partly because of concerns about would the unregulated entity have reduced its pollution anyhow? And that's hit a lot of problems.

Vennela Damarla: 37:26

Okay, moving on to final question, if you could achieve one major milestone in your career related to sustainability, what would it be and why?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 37:37

I would say the thing that gave me the most hope, it sounds weird, is the inflation Reduction Act of 2022 that was a US act that implemented, by international standards, a huge program to shift the United States away from generating greenhouse gasses. I think the target was to reduce greenhouse gasses by 30% by the end of this decade, and was sort of on course to do that, and that had some innovations in there. It was much more of this paying people to do the right thing, and much less emphasis on taxes and quotas and such like. And it seems to be working. So the United States is going to, is starting to put together battery factories for cars and moving especially on the car side of things, there's been more plans to do renewable energy and such always hits barriers. So in renewable energy, hitting barriers with with the permitting system and environmental assessment system. So that's creating barriers, and you get lots of pushback because this externality thing, what'll happen is somebody announces, oh, we're going to put a solar panel farm just across the road from where you live. And I don't want that. That's going to be an eyesore. Well, people don't think of the consequence. Well, if that wasn't built, then the extra energy would come from a gas fired power plant somewhere else. So you're by preventing this thing your produce, you're going to add to greenhouse gas emissions somewhere else. So there's a cost to what you're doing. And the other way we don't think about it also is we're like, well, well, they've got a case. I mean, if there's, there's going to be an ugly, ugly thing just across the street. And that's imposing. Why don't we compensate them somehow. Why don't we maybe reduce their property taxes, buy them a car, do something to compensate because otherwise what happens is a small group of people who are going to suffer relatively small costs will be so motivated they can stop something that everybody else would want to happen. So sometimes a little bit of bribery substitution might be coming handy.

Vennela Damarla: 39:44

Yes, thank you so much. Dr Michael Shelley, any final concluding thoughts that you would like to tell to our audience?

Dr. Michael Shelly: 39:53

Okay, well, your audience probably going to be in public health and only going to be an environment, and that's extremely important, I would suggest. That you should, you should link up with your local economists as well, because often they can help you to put some some costs on these things, and that will often swing the argument. It's one one thing people, there is something when you do economics, you find that something strange in happens in people's minds. When you put $1 or a pound or a rupee sign in front of a number, somebody that number gets some bigger significance, and perhaps it should. So it's one thing to say that, Oh, we will, you know, if implementing my idea will reduce cases of a disease by this much, or might we prevent this many deaths that will have an impact. But if you then try and monetize that, and you say it's going to be worth millions of dollars, or 10s of millions of some of that as a added benefit as well. So it's a good way to think about things. And sometimes, what if you're proposing something where you can have a health improvement, which is fairly minor, but it's going to cost an awful lot of money, well, maybe that's not such a good use of society's resources, because the money that's used on that health program, maybe that could have been more useful to use in, say, an education program or in another health program. There's always a cost to these things. See, you got to look at the costs and the benefits, and that's where your local, friendly economist. We have an economics department here. That's where they can help.

Vennela Damarla: 41:12

Yeah. Thank you so much. Dr Michael Shelley, for your time and sharing the knowledge about environmental economics and then providing insights about a lot of things. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. See you in the next episode of Buffalo health cast

Vennela Damarla: 0:00

Welcome to Buffalo HealthCast, the official podcast of the University of Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions. This is Vennela Damarla, the Podcast Producer for Buffalo HealthCast, and an MPH student. Today we have Dr. Gauri Desai environmental epidemiology with training in epidemiology and microbiology. Dr. Desai, research focuses on impact of environmental toxins on children's growth and development, as well as the role of diet in mitigating this toxic exposures. She is also a dedicated educator, teaching undergraduate courses on global health, public health, epidemiology and maternal and child health. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Desai,

Dr. Gauri Desai: 0:45

Thank you for having me.

Vennela Damarla: 0:48

So let's begin with some of the questions. Dr. Desai, before we get into the science, could you share a bit about your background, what sparked your interest in studying dietary toxicants and their impact on health, especially in young children.

Dr. Gauri Desai: 1:05

So you were right about my background. My background is both in microbiology and epidemiology, particularly in the field of environmental and nutritional epidemiology. So I started out with an interest in environmental exposures and how they impact children's growth and development, and understanding whether and how changing the child's diet can help in reducing the toxicity of those environmental exposures. So as I continue to work in this domain, the experts in this field started pointing to the fact that dietary components are certainly beneficial to health, and they can also reduce the toxicity of environment mental exposures to some extent, but sometimes these dietary components themselves can be sources of toxicants. So I was it was through the reading of the upcoming literature and understanding where the field was going that I started developing an interest in this, in this topic.

Vennela Damarla: 2:10

Well, thank you, Dr. Desai, that was interesting to know. So let's start with the questions now, could you help us understand what dietary toxicants are. What does this term mean in the context of food?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 2:24

Sure, so a dietary toxicants means the exposure to elements like in this case, like lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, other elements that we get through food. So in the context of food, it means that some foods might expose us to these toxic elements to different degrees.

Vennela Damarla: 2:48

Well, that was very, really easy to understand. Thank you for simplifying it. So what are the common toxicant found in everyday foods, and how might they differ from food contaminants.

Dr. Gauri Desai: 3:02

I think I'll start with the second part of the question. First, food toxicants are a subset of food contaminants. So food can be contaminated by multiple things. It could be chemicals, micro organisms, other organic matter, and also elements like lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, etc. And so toxic elements such as lead, arsenic, etc, are a type of contaminant. So it's really one is the subset of the other.

Vennela Damarla: 3:31

Well, you have mentioned that lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury are one of the most common toxicants. So how do these toxicants end up powering food supply?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 3:44

So toxicants can become part of our foods, both naturally as well as through human activities. So let me start with the example of arsenic. Arsenic is a naturally occurring element in the Earth's crust and through human activities, like when we dig deep into the Earth's crust to get to water, when we are extracting this groundwater for use, sometimes that arsenic, which is naturally there in the Earth's crust, gets mobilized, and then it enters The groundwater in in the water system, in the water supply. Now, the food that is grown or is cooked using this contaminated water can retain some of that arsenic. Contaminated soil is another source that we need to consider. So this soil contamination could be a natural process, like in the case of arsenic, or it could be because we are looking at an urban garden that's right next to a highway and has really high amounts of lead from the dust, so sources like traffic, street dust or incineration tire, where these can contribute to soil contamination Particularly with lead in an urban environment. Another aspect of this is certain types of vegetables are more likely to accumulate high levels of harmful heavy metals than others. So in general, these heavy metals, elements in general, tend to accumulate in root, leaf and stem tissues. So vegetables like sweet potatoes, carrots, spinach, broccoli naturally will have higher amounts of these toxicants compared to vegetables that come from flowers, like cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers as well. And then finally, I want to stress that with lead, lead is an element that is used in glazed ceramics in a lot of cultures in a lot of countries. So the glass dishes and pots that are used to serve food, a lot of these contain really pretty design, colorful design, but that's made out of lead, and so eating right from these ceramic pots and dishes will expose people to lead, so overall, toxicants can come to our foods from different sources, and they have been found in both store bought as well as homemade foods.

Vennela Damarla: 6:24

Thank you. Dr. Desai, so basically, these toxicants are naturally occurring as well as they are introduced to human activities. Absolutely yes. So people keep in mind, when you see a very fancy stuff out there, don't just buy it because it might contain higher amounts of lead. So moving on to the next question, we often hear that infants and young children are more vulnerable to certain substances. Why is dietary exposure to this toxicants especially concerning for young children?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 6:59

So that's a very important point. So infants and young children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of exposures to toxic elements, and there are a few reasons for that. So one is that children have high amounts of toxicant exposures because they their intake per unit body weight is higher than that of adults. So if food is the source of toxicants, these kids are their intake per body. Unit body weight is higher, and so that is going to end up, they are going to end up with a higher body burden of these toxicants. Another aspect is that as adults, our bodies have certain mechanisms by which we are able to detoxify these contaminants, to some extent, to different degrees. Infants and young children are still developing, and for the most part, their bodies have not yet developed these mechanisms fully. They're not ready in place, and so their ability to detoxify these toxicants when they are exposed to it is very limited. And then finally, we need to keep in mind that exposure that happens when the body is still growing and developing has long term and oftentimes irreversible effects. So exposure seen in that is seen in infancy and childhood can have consequences that we see in adulthood, and they persist throughout the life. So it really is a very critical and vulnerable stage, a vulnerable population. So we do need to pay special attention to infants and young children in the population.

Vennela Damarla: 8:45

Okay, so how does exposure to toxic and in infancy and early childhood differ from exposure later in life?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 8:54

So it really goes back to what makes infants and young children vulnerable. I mentioned a few of these things earlier, in terms of, you know, the exposure that happens in that phase of life that really has very severe and lifelong, oftentimes irreversible consequences. So let me take the example of lead. There have been, you know, a lot of several studies that have shown that early life lead exposure is linked with children's cognitive development. So it is inversely associated it hampers children's cognitive development. It's associated inversely with, again, children's academic achievement, which in turn impacts their employment, impacts their salaries as well in adulthood, so impacts their whole life trajectories. We've seen that early life lead exposure is associated with violent behavior, with jail time as well, so a lot of severe consequences with arsenic, we see cognitive deficits when early life exposure happens, several types of cancers, kidney damage, skin lesions, heart disease have also been seen in adulthood. So really, it is that early life stage that we want to focus on when exposure happens in this stage, there are several long term, sometimes even intergenerational consequences. So that's why it differs from you know, when exposure happens later in life.

Vennela Damarla: 10:34

It's really awful to know that this toxicant can cause cognitive impairment, cancer, kidney diseases and a lot more. So moving on to the next question, what are some of the health risks associated with exposure to heavy metals and toxicants like arsenic or lead?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 10:54

So some of the things I mentioned before different types of cancers, so it really depends on which element we are looking at, whether it's lead, arsenic, cadmium, what levels are we looking at and what specific population are we looking at? Is it infants? Is it toddlers? Is it school going? Children? Other factors that impact the outcomes are things like, are they sufficient or deficient in certain nutrients? What the What's the nutritional status of the population? What is the environment in which they are growing? So are these kids growing in a sort of a medium to rich household? What's the socio economic status? What are the other types of intellectual stimuli that they are getting from the household? So all of these things will play a role. But keeping this in mind, the generally seen adverse health outcomes associated with these heavy metals include cancers, cardiovascular diseases. So heart disease, diabetes, cholesterol levels, kidney disease, skin lesions, cognitive deficits, educational attainment, etc. So a wide, really wide range of outcomes,

Vennela Damarla: 12:14

Yes, yeah, there are really wide range of health risk associated with this, toxicants. Moving on to next question, how can chronic exposure to this elements impact a child's development or overall health?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 12:27

That's a really good point. It's important to distinguish between one episode of acute exposure versus getting constantly exposed to it chronically for years and years, even though it is at a low level. So since your question focuses on the second part, I think it's important to state that even if you know an individual or a community is being exposed to low levels of toxicants, but it's chronic exposure, years and years worth of exposure, we do still see a lot of these adverse outcomes that I mentioned, including developmental deficits, including cancers and cardiovascular outcomes. So even at low levels, a lot of these toxicants are are seen to be harmful.

Vennela Damarla: 13:15

Okay, so are there currently any regulations or guidelines in the US for acceptable levels of this toxicants in foods, especially in baby foods.

Dr. Gauri Desai: 13:27

Yes,So we do have, we do have some regulations. We have something called as the interim reference level, IRL, it is a benchmark or a reference level that the FDA, the US Food and Drug Administration. FDA, the FDA uses these to determine if the amount of exposure to the contaminant in food is something to be concerned about in terms of health risks. So is it? Is it a health concern? So based on that, the interim reference level for dietary lead intake for children is 2.2 micrograms per day. So to give you an idea, one microgram is 1,000,000th of a gram. So the FDA says that 2.2 micrograms per day is the limit for lead exposure in children through diet. The European Food Safety Agency has a reference value of 0.36 micrograms per kilograms, body weight per day for cadmium. In Europe, they also have a reference value for arsenic. So yes, overall, globally, different countries have different levels of regulations. Since you are specifically asking about the US, there is an FDA set limit for lead in foods, but we do not have a set enforceable level for arsenic and cadmium generally for foods. The FDA has something called as the closer to zero action plan, and this is. A plan that aims to reduce dietary toxicant exposure, and as part of the plan, the FDA will release these reference levels for dietary arsenic and other toxicants as well. So right now we have a level for lead, but levels for lead and cadmium, probably mercury as well, are coming up, so it's in the works. Another aspect of this is FDA does have a guideline for how much arsenic or how much lead is permissible in specific types of baby foods, like in cereal or in fruit juices. But note that these currently are guidelines. They are not enforceable, so we do have an idea of what's permissible. It's not all of that is enforceable, but some of it is coming up.

Vennela Damarla: 15:46

IRL is something that that is something new that I've learned today. So hopefully we'll wait for the all the guidelines of the toxicants related to arsenic and many other toxicants soon. So how do us regulations compare to those in other countries, such as the European Union, which is often seen as more restrictive.

Dr. Gauri Desai: 16:09

Sure, So like I mentioned, the European Food Safety Agency currently does have reference values for arsenic and cadmium as well. In the US, we don't, we only have one set up for lead, but we are slowly catching up. Soon, the FDA will release these reference values for arsenic and cadmium. So it will it it's coming up.

Vennela Damarla: 16:35

In recent studies, certain foods showed higher toxicant levels. What does current research tells us about the level of toxicants in popular baby food plants.

Dr. Gauri Desai: 16:46

So yes, toxicants have been found in several baby foods manufactured by several brands, generally speaking, from all of those, the gist is that there are some baby foods that are likely to have or more likely to have toxicants than other baby foods. So rice puffs, juices, teething biscuits, rice cereal, carrots and sweet potatoes are the most common ones that babies consume, but they are also the common wants to have toxicants, so rice is a well known source of arsenic, and so rice based baby foods do have some some levels of arsenic, and then carrots and sweet potatoes as well. So we have been able to identify some of these as sort of high risk foods. So that's that's some progress on that front.

Vennela Damarla: 17:43

It seems like everything around us, including food, has a some amount of toxicant levels. So could you share any surprising findings from recent studies on toxicants in food?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 17:56

Sure. So, it's not entirely surprising if you know how toxicants might get in in the foods, but still, a lot of people find it very surprising that not just store bought but even homemade baby foods also do contain a lot of toxicants. So it's a myth that all homemade foods are free of toxicants. Unfortunately, they're not if a food naturally contains lead or arsenic, rice, sweet potatoes, carrots are example, even if you cook it at home, it will have some degree of these toxicants.

Vennela Damarla: 18:36

Yeah, it is really surprising to know even the homemade food also has toxicant levels. So what steps can parents or caregivers take to reduce their children's exposure to this toxicants in food?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 18:51

So one main point here is to ensure that the child has a varied and diverse diet, so completely avoiding one food because it's likely to have heavy metals or toxic elements. It's a bad idea, because foods are also sources of nutrients, so we don't want to eliminate foods from the diet out of the fear of getting exposed to toxicants. Having a varied and diverse diet ensures that the child is not getting concentrated exposure from the same two foods that they're eating, but they're also getting nutrition from multiple foods. So a varied, diverse diet is clearly the way to go, overall, promoting the intake of water over juice, not only focusing on the intake of rice, the reason I'm stressing that here is one, rice is a well known source of arsenic, so to different degrees, it will likely contain some arsenic. And two, generally, we see that parents tend to have a rice heavy diet for their kids. And it makes sense, because rice is easily available. Available. It's easy to cook, it's easy to eat, it's easy to digest. Yes, it makes sense, but from this perspective, focusing only on rice might not be a great idea. Focusing on multiple grains would be the way to go, in addition eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, while ensuring safe cooking and eating practices is what parents could focus on.

Vennela Damarla: 20:25

So you mentioned that safe cooking methods might help reduce what cooking methods or what particular foods that might help reduce or limit the exposure?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 20:36

Yeah. So in terms of cooking methods, if the tap water that's available in the household is safe, then washing fruits and vegetables well is recommended. Peeling root vegetables like sweet potatoes, peeling sweet potatoes, peeling carrots, is recommended if we are talking about rice and arsenic, if the tap water is safe. Washing rice with excess water, so washing it multiple times, throwing away that water, using a lot of water to wash the rice is recommended. In addition, if you are growing your own fruits and vegetables, a lot of people do safe gardening techniques is also essential. So using raised beds in an urban environment, urban garden is another recommended way to at least reduce the amount of amount of exposure, and then when it comes to the other side, serving and eating, avoiding these ceramic glazes that might have led is another recommendation.

Vennela Damarla: 21:43

Well, thank you so much. So Dr. Desai, I'm curious to know if the organic foods that we get outside, which is very expensive, say that they're very safe, pure, and then they're free from pesticides. So do you think it's the organic foods are any different from the normal foods with pesticides.

Dr. Gauri Desai: 22:05

So, that's a good point in terms of pesticide application. They probably don't use the same types and the same amounts of pesticides. Since they are organic, they would be free from those, but they wouldn't necessarily be free from toxicants like arsenic, lead and cadmium, because organic foods are grown without the use of pesticides, but if they are grown in soil that has lead in it, or irrigated using water that has arsenic in it, just being organic is not going to help us get rid of these toxicants. So yes, they are expensive, and probably it's worth the money because you are not getting exposed to those kinds of pesticides. But you can't say the same for these toxic elements.

Vennela Damarla: 22:59

Turns out to be organic foods are not really safe, as they are portray. So moving on to the next question, What responsibility do you believe food manufacturers should have in managing toxicant levels, especially in products that are aimed at children?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 23:18

Yeah. So if you are a manufacturer, or producer of food, there are some things that are discussed in the literature found to be effective to different degrees. So alternating irrigation practices, avoiding the use of contaminated water while growing those crops. Again, if we are talking about an urban environment, avoiding urban gardens with no raised beds. So if there's no other option, of course, an urban garden is useful because it's a source of food, but then using a raised bed, using safe soil, safe water, is something that's that's recommended.

Vennela Damarla: 24:00

Okay, so are there industry practices that could help reduce toxicant level in the foods we eat?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 24:08

Sure, so this goes back to how toxicants get into the foods. So some ways in which the industry can be a little bit more responsible towards this issue is thinking about where they're sourcing the foods from. So sourcing foods from areas that are not well known sources of contaminants, geographically speaking, is important. So for example, let's go with rice. Rice is a well known source of arsenic. We also generally have a good idea of which geographic areas have high levels of arsenic in the groundwater. So if we know this, avoiding sourcing rice from those areas would be an example of responsible sort of technique or behavior from the industry Point.

Vennela Damarla: 25:01

What are some critical areas for future research in dietary toxicants?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 25:06

So understanding how the overall diet, and not just individual foods, contribute to toxicant exposure, is one thing that's really needed. We also need to understand how much disease burden in the population is because of dietary toxicants. So we know that toxicants are bad. We know that diet is a source, but we don't clearly know how much disease that we see in the population can be linked back to the toxicant exposure that's happening exclusively through diet. So understanding that link understanding those numbers, is essential. These are big gaps in knowledge that we do need to fill through our research.

Vennela Damarla: 25:54

Well. Thank you for simplifying that. Dr. Desai, moving on to next question, if there were one or two policies you would recommend to better protect consumers from dietary toxicants, what would they be?

Dr. Gauri Desai: 26:09

So I think the first is to set reference levels for elements that don't currently have them. So arsenic and cadmium are prime examples. Those are coming in future, hopefully soon. The other is to test the final products, and not just ingredients, for toxicant levels. So a lot of recent studies have found that many baby food companies tested individual ingredients for metal levels, but not the final product. So what they found was each individual ingredient had a very low level of toxicant. And that's probably true. A lot of individual ingredients might have a low level of a toxicant, but when you combine all of these ingredients, the final product could have high levels. So that's what we need to regulate. Testing just ingredients is not sufficient. Testing the final product is equally important. So those are some regulations that I think are absolutely essential.

Vennela Damarla: 27:09

Well, any final concluding thoughts that you want, you would want to tell our audience? Dr. Desai,

Dr. Gauri Desai: 27:15

Sure, so I want to go back and reiterate the importance of a diverse and varied diet. Toxicants are there in our food supply. It's very difficult to completely avoid them, so we need to remember that, yes, foods probably do contain some degrees of toxicants, but foods are incredibly important sources of nutrition that we need throughout our life. So a diverse diet is going to ensure that we get the nutrients we need while not exposing us to very high levels of one element through one food that we eat every single day. So a diverse diet is something that is important, and that's what I would like to reiterate towards the end.

Vennela Damarla: 28:02

Thank you so much, Dr. Desai, for your time and for sharing your valuable knowledge with us. Thank you so much.

Dr. Gauri Desai: 28:10

Absolutely. I was happy to be able to come here and thank you for having me.

Vennela Damarla: 28:16

Yeah, and also, there were so many surprising facts also that we have learned today. Yeah, see you on another episode on Buffalo HealthCast. Thank you.

Dr. Gauri Desai: 28:25

Thank you. 

Vennela Damarla: 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Buffalo HealthCast, the official podcast of the School of Public Health and Health Professions at the University at Buffalo. I am Vennela Damarla, MPH student and Podcast Producer. Today we have a very special guest, Dr. Diana S. Aga, SUNY distinguished professor and Henry M. Woodburn, professor of chemistry at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Aga is also the director of Renew Institute, and she is internationally recognized for her groundbreaking research in environmental chemistry, her work which focuses on the fate and transport of contaminants like pharmaceuticals and persistent pollutants in the environment. It plays a crucial role in addressing global challenges such as environmental pollution and antibiotic resistance, known for her innovative use of mass spectroscopy to detect environmental contaminants, Dr. Aga has not only contributed immensely to our understanding of these issues, but also has been a mentor to the next generation of environmental scientists. In today's conversations will delve into Dr. Aga's work on PFS and often referred to as forever chemicals and antibiotic resistance, exploring the intersection of this environmental health concerns. Dr. Aga, thank you so much for joining us today. Could you share with us initially, what drew to study environmental contaminants like PFAs and antimicrobial resistance, and what motivates your research in this critical areas.

Diana Aga: 1:41

Thank you for inviting me here. Thank you Vennela for inviting me in your podcast. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. Dr. Aga, yeah so PFAs and antimicrobial resistance are two separate issues. I was first drawn to study antimicrobial resistance. Well, growing up in the Philippines, there's always problems with environmental pollution, and some of this pollution actually causes health effects on humans. One of the things that drove me into studying antimicrobial resistance is that I know so many people who do not get cured, even after taking some medications, I learned that one of the issues is that antibiotics have caused antimicrobial resistance, or so called superbugs. These superbugs are pathogenic bacteria that are no longer being affected or being treated by antibiotics that we are currently using in that case, I started thinking about, why is there emergence of antimicrobial resistance? And one of the things I've been finding is that many people, especially in third world countries, are using and misusing and abusing and overusing antibiotics, and this leads to antimicrobial resistance in bacteria. Later in my academic life, I started working on PFAs, which we call forever chemicals. This is a more recent topic of my research. I started working on PFAs as analytical chemist, because one of the biggest challenges on doing research in this persistent forever chemicals is the lack of technologies to detect them in the environment. As analytical chemists, I can contribute to developing methods that are able to detect really small amount of PFAs in the environment.

Vennela Damarla: 3:38

Thank you so much. Dr. Aga, that was very interesting to know about Super box and your motivation to study the research. Moving on to next question, PFAs are often termed as forever chemicals due to their persistence in the environment. Can you explain the primary source of PFAs contamination and how they enter our water systems?

Diana Aga: 3:59

Yeah, that's a very good question. PFAs are industrial chemicals as well as components of domestic products that can be found everywhere, when I mean everywhere, we can think about firefighting foams that are used to suppress fires, that are used in military activities to our home products, from non stick cooking wear to make up to clothings. Some of our clothings that are stain resistant or water repellent, like rain coats, contain PFAs, our carpets, our toilet papers and even toys for kids. So how they enter the environment are also various ways in industrial areas, such as semiconductor industries, they use Pfas for etching in military size. They they use Pfas for firefighting activities. And so they enter the environment in. Municipal wastewater treatment plants. They enter these treatment plants through our sewage systems, because when we wash our clothes or when we clean our carpets, most of those PFAs that are released from our domestic products enter our waterways. Seems like PFAs are present everywhere. Your Research Highlights various health impacts of PFAs exposures. Could you elaborate on the most concerning health risk that are associated PFAs and the mechanism by which they affect human health?

Vennela Damarla: 5:34

Yes, it's actually very interesting, because while PFAs exposure have been associated to various health effects such as kidney cancer, neurodevelopmental delays and immune system suppression. There are actually many other things that PFAs can affect, and unfortunately, the mechanisms by which they affect human and wildlife is still quite unknown, because PFAs appears in the environment as mixtures, and it's very hard to distinguish the toxicity of the various components of PFAs. But for now, what we know and from other research, is that PFAs exposure is associated with various diseases, particularly kidney cancer. It's devastating to know that PFAs, which are present everywhere surrounding us, can cause kidney cancers, immunosuppressions in human beings. So moving on to the next question, one of your studies discusses the use of fluorine magnetic resonance spectroscopy for PFAs quantification. What are the challenges in detecting of PFAs?

Diana Aga: 6:46

Yes, PFAs composed of more than 12,000 different types of molecules, so to detect all of them is already very challenging. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency approved method can only detect 40 PFAs, so that alone is not enough. The current method for detecting PFAs is called liquid chromatography mass spectrometry or LCMS, and that has a limitation, because it can only detect certain set of PFAs and many of the other PFAs molecules remain undetected. So we are looking for other ways that will complement LCMS. And one of the things that we can use is this, fluorine, nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR for PFAs quantification. This is a very good tool, because can measure all types of PFAs, whether they are positively charged, negatively charged or neutral. The only limitation of NMR is that you need to have high quantities of PFAs in the sample to be able to detect them. So both of these methods, LCMS and NMR, have their own set of limitations, but they also have their own unique advantages.

Vennela Damarla: 8:10

Thank you. Dr. Aga, it was interesting to know about LC ms as well as fluorine, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. So what are the scientists doing in removing the PFAs?

Diana Aga: 8:23

Yes, that's a very good question. Many, many scientists are racing towards the perfect method to remove PFAs in water and in solids. But up to now, there is no perfect method yet, but we are moving along our group ourselves. We are looking for bacteria in the wastewater and in the environment that we can use to biodegrade PFAs. We are also looking at so called nanotechnology, which use synthesized compounds that are nanomaterials to degrade PFAs. Other people are using plasma and supercritical water and all kinds of high energy treatment systems, while we are finding that they can sometimes remove PFAs, they are not yet perfect. They're only partially degrade PFAs, and most of them, they just convert them to smaller molecules that are still called PFAs. So it's basically, you can say you are treating bigger PFAs in chopping them into smaller PFAs. So the ideal treatment system is to figure out a way to completely mineralize PFAs, meaning to completely break down the carbon and fluorine bonds and make them into a non harmful chemicals.

Vennela Damarla: 9:50

Well, that's a lot of work the scientists have been doing in removing PFAs. Moving on to the next question in your publication, in one or you emphasize. Solution focused communication and regulation for addressing PFAs pollution. What key strategies should policy makers and communities adapt to effectively manage and mitigate PFAs risk?

Diana Aga: 10:13

Yes, one of the things that I think should be implemented by policy makers is to label all products that consumers use and label them if they contain PFAs. And also provide communities, some fact sheets or some easy to use information that will identify any products that we use that has PFAs. For example, I don't think that many people know that some toilet papers actually contain PFAs. I'm not sure how many people know that packaging materials for some of the sandwiches or the microwavable popcorn may contain PFAs. So having that knowledge be installed or be be translated to communities will help us manage our risks, as well as find ways to manage the these products, these packaging materials, and properly dispose them instead of putting them in mixed with other waste products that will end up in the environment.

Vennela Damarla: 11:25

Well, it's surprising to know they are even present in the popcorn packages and even in our food items. Moving on to the next question, can you explain how environmental drivers of AMR, which is antimicrobial resistance, have influence, especially in agriculture settings.

Diana Aga: 11:43

Yeah, so in agriculture, especially in big animal feeding operations, we normally use antibiotics to treat diseases so that the animals don't spread their infections to others. However, sometimes the manure contain residues of antibiotics, which are then spread to the field to fertilize crop plants, because manure is a very good source for fertilizer. So some of these antibiotics that persist in the environment can affect microorganisms, and they might acquire antimicrobial resistance genes. So these are some drivers of AMR that can be mitigated in the agricultural setting. There are ways to treat manure, for example, composting, but some some farms do not implement this, and so there are ways also to reduce the use of antibiotics in agriculture. And while there are now regulations in the US, many other countries, especially in the developing countries, still use antibiotics without the approval of veterinary veterinarians, and that creates an environment to develop and proliferate AMR.

Vennela Damarla: 13:06

Okay, while PFAs and AMR are distinct issues, both are critical environment health concerns. Is there any intersection between PFAs and contamination and the development or spread of antimicrobial resistance that your research has uncovered?

Diana Aga: 13:25

Yes, that's a very interesting question. So typically, AMR or antimicrobial resistance is thought to be created because of the low levels of antibiotics in the environment where bacteria are exposed to. So most research have really only looked at concentrations of antibiotics in the environment that's causing AMR however, in the presence of PFAs and really other chemical contaminants, such as pesticides metals, they exert additional pressure to bacteria that will make the bacteria be strong and kind of develop a way to persist even at conditions that are not conducive for their growth. Sometimes they release genes that may include anti microbial resistance genes to survive. So this mechanism of survival of the fittest creates AMR in the environment and can be exacerbated by the presence of PFAs and other chemicals.

Vennela Damarla: 14:33

Moving on to the next question, what emerging technologies or methodologies Do you foresee playing a pivotal role in combining PFAs pollution and antimicrobial resistance in the next decade.

Diana Aga: 14:49

Yeah. So these are two very different problems, so they will require different technologies. I first talk about PFAs, one. One of the things that we can do combat PFAs pollution is to find good replacement. So right now, PFAs is really necessary for many industries. For example, the semiconductor industries that we need for manufacturing here in the US still need to use PFAs until now, there are no good alternatives. People are also looking for fluorine free components of firefighting foams, and we still need to figure out how to make our clothing water repellent or how to make our packaging better. But I think there are now big advancements in this area. So basically, finding a good replacement for PFAs is number one solution to PFAs pollution. Second, we also find cost effective way to destroy PFAs. Right now, the ones that can destroy PFAs are requiring so much energy to implement, and that is not sustainable. The next thing I want to talk about is antimicrobial resistance. So you ask about what emerging technologies we can use to combat AMR that's a little bit easier actually, because right now, we have already implemented some measures to reduce the use of antibiotics and to properly dispose of them, so that has actually improved a lot, at least in the US. In other countries where antibiotics are manufactured, we need to find a way to treat the anti microbial wastes, or the manufacturing wastes for companies that create in terms of antimicrobial resistance, that's actually a little bit easier, because in the US, there are already policies that have reduced the use of antibiotics in agriculture, and also most people are now aware that antibiotics should not be overused, and when we are done with drugs, we can also now dispose them properly. I think the problem still exists in other developing countries, especially where antibiotics are manufactured. Some of these manufacturing companies do not have proper way of disposing wastes that contains residues of high concentrations of antibiotics. So those are things that needs to be addressed. I think the World Health Organization are now trying to regulate some of these waste so that the residues of antibiotics do not end up in the environment.

Vennela Damarla: 17:46

Well, it's good to know that World Health Organization is also playing an important role in eliminating the PFAs. Moving on to the next question, how important is public awareness in tackling environmental contaminants like PFAs and AMR, and what role can scientists play in educating communities?

Diana Aga: 18:08

Oh, it is very important. Public awareness is critical to tackling the problems of PFAs and AMR, because if the public is aware of the dangers of PFAs and AMR, they can make choices. For example, they can make choices not to consume microwavable popcorn, not to buy non stick pots and pans, or make sure that the products that they use, the personal care products, like makeup, toilet paper and others that they use, do not contain PFAs in terms of AMR, I think sometimes some people do not know that when you have a viral infection, you should not use antibiotics, because that is not going to cure viral infections. So simple things like that will help combat AMR in terms of the role that scientists can play in educating communities, I think it is important for scientists to engage with public and be able to communicate in layman's terms, not in very scientific terms. Unlike what they write in scientific articles, they can communicate in layman's terms, what PFAs are and what they do to the body or what AMR is, and how we can prevent them from happening. We can start with educating our children, and also public schools so that they can start early in the education to educate our next generation people and be aware of PFAs in AMR.

Vennela Damarla: 19:48

Well, that's an excellent strategy, such as implementing the education to the children, so that the communities, as well as children, right from the childhood are aware of the PFAs. Well, your work is highly interdisciplinary, involving chemistry, toxicology and environmental science. How important are collaborative efforts across different scientific disciplines in addressing complex environmental health issues?

Diana Aga: 20:16

It is actually critical to collaborate with many different scientific disciplines. So as analytical chemists, I work closely with people in the epidemiology, in toxicology, in engineering, in policy, because I can detect PFAs and antibiotics in all kinds of matrices. But what do I do with the data? So it is really important for me to know what the other disciplines need. For example, when I collaborate with scientists from the epidemiology department, they want to know what levels of PFAs are in the blood or in the human breast milk, so that they can be informed on how to associate wealth, health and well being of people with the environmental levels of PFAs. When I collaborate with the engineers, I need to know what kind of technologies they are using to treat and destroy PFAs, and they want to know if their technologies are indeed effectively removing PFAs by measuring what is left. So these are really important for all the disciplines to collaborate together. Lastly, for example, in the toxic for toxicologists, we want to know how to measure the toxic effects of the PFAs in the environment.

Vennela Damarla: 21:43

Thank you. Dr. Aga, this is truly motivating for students and young professionals interested in pursuing environmental health, particularly in areas like PFAs and AMR. What advice would you offer?

Diana Aga: 21:57

I think the best way to do is to have a general knowledge of all kinds of this environmental pollution issues, and not be very specific to a particular topic. For example, if you're a chemist, you should not only study chemistry. You should attend seminars in various departments, you should listen to podcasts or webinars or read scientific magazines that cover various disciplines so that you can apply your chemistry knowledge in areas outside chemistry. If you are an epidemiologist, make sure you attend interdisciplinary programs and talk to other scientists in the field. This is why I think training programs that require interdisciplinary interactions is really important. Some of the National Science Foundation programs are now encouraging many disciplines to interact, through seminars, through communities of practice, through other ways that are not traditional.

Vennela Damarla: 23:10

Okay, so it's important to focus on multiple areas rather than sticking on to the one focus itself, moving on to the next question, could you share a particularly rewarding moment or breakthrough in your research journey that has significantly impacted your work or perceptive?

Diana Aga: 23:29

Yes, I can go back to way during my PhD studies. So my research during my graduate school is to look at pesticides in the environment, and one of the things that I found is when pesticides degrade, they don't necessarily mean that the environment is clean, that it's free of contaminants. Through my research, I actually found that sometimes chemicals are only transformed to a different type of molecule, which may or may not still have toxicity or environmental impacts. So one of the most rewarding thing that I found is I found through my graduate research that a chemical, in particular, it's a pesticide called alachlor, is actually transformed to an alachlor sulfonic acid metabolite that is actually very polar, so it actually gets leached down to groundwater and stays in groundwater for a long time. Now, this chemical that I discovered is included in the EPA contaminant list, so people are monitoring it to figure out if this chemical may lead to environmental degradation or ecological impacts. So for me, that is very rewarding to see that something that I found. Through my graduate work is now being monitored or included in the candidate contaminant list of the EPA.

Vennela Damarla: 25:07

Well, this is truly inspiring. Dr. Aga, moving on to the next question, what upcoming projects or research initiatives are you excited about, and how do you hope they will contribute to the field of environmental health.

Diana Aga: 25:21

Yes, one of I'm into many different research activities, but one of the things I'm really excited about is finding a way to measure mixture toxicity. I'm collaborating with toxicologists in Germany, and we just published a paper together with my students and my collaborator in the chemistry department, we found out that we can now predict mixture toxicity of PFAs through our results for high throughput in vitro assays. We can extend this research to develop new mechanisms or new ways to measure unknown chemicals as well. By knowing the toxicity and having the ability to predict toxicity of different chemicals, we can really determine the true impact of chemical pollutants that we find in the environment that exist in mixtures.

Vennela Damarla: 26:26

This is really exciting. Dr. Aga. And moving on to our final question, what last advice would you give to our listeners in order to help mitigate the risk associated with the PFAs and antimicrobial resistance in their communities.

Diana Aga: 26:42

Well, again, these are two different things. So in terms of PFAs, make sure you know which of the products that you're using contain PFAs. There is actually a website that will tell you some of the products in the trademark that contain PFAs. So this is a good start. Then I would also say, if you are concerned that your drinking water may contain PFAs, you could put filters home, filters to make sure that your water is free of PFAs. In terms of antimicrobial resistance. One simple thing you can do is that if you have drugs that are leftovers or you're no longer using don't flush it to your toilet, because if you do that, the drugs will end up in our water supplies. They they go to the surface water, which may be used as a source for drinking water. So those are simple things that we can do to help mitigate this environmental pollutants.

Vennela Damarla: 27:44

Thank you so much, Dr. Aga for enlisting all the things that we can do in order to mitigate the risk associated with the PFAs and antimicrobial resistance in their community. Well, thank you so much for your time. We are honored to have you as a guest in Buffalo HealthCast, see you in another episode of Buffalo HealthCast. Thank you.

Vennela Damarla: 0:04

Welcome to another episode of Buffalo HealthCast. I'm Vennela Damarla Podcast Producer, and today we have Dr. Meng Wang, a leading expert in environmental health research. In this episode, we will be discussing Dr. Wang's research, which focuses on impact of air pollution, particularly ozone, on lung health and the progression of emphysema. Whether you are a health care professional or interested in learning more about air pollution, this episode of valuable insights. Dr. Wang, thank you so much for joining us today. So before we get into your interesting research. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what motivated you to pursue this research? Yeah,

Dr. Meng Wang: 0:48

Sure, so. My name is Meng Wang. I am an environmental health scientist. Most of my research focuses on for assessment of air pollution and also trying to understand how air pollution could cause adverse effect of human health. Well, I did modeling work, and has been involved in several large collaborative studies focusing on mostly focusing on respiratory and cardiovascular health. The motivation of me to involved in this study actually has been for a long time. So my background actually originally from atmospheric science, not related to health at all. So at that time, I'm curious about like the chemistry of atmosphere, and then realizing some gluttons are really toxic, making me feel like how this chemicals could affect human health. So that moves me towards the health field. So it's a learning process for me for several years, and then I try to involved in some large cohort studies in there. I can collaborate with some physicians there, environment epidemiologist there, so I can leverage my experience in atmospheric science, but also find linkage to epidemiology. So that is why nowadays my I can my focus is on air pollution related epidemiology. 

Vennela Damarla: 2:32

It's wonderful. Dr. Wang, so let us start with some questions. How do you see in the section of climate change and air quality evolving, and what implication does this have for respiratory health in the future?

Dr. Meng Wang: 2:47

Yeah, so this is very big topic. I would say that climate change is general term, which means that it can be related to many extreme weathers like increased temperature, right? And then increased temperature can cause extreme heat and cold storms and etc. And this climate factors can actually impact air quality. So one typical example is wildfire, because now you can see that when the temperature goes up, the drought goes up, then it's possible that burning is getting more frequent, right, especially when we see lots of wildfires happen in the West Coast of the United States as well as in the Canadian country. So this is definitely indirect impact of climate change on air quality and the problem of wildfire smoke is that in the US and Canada, government has making a long term effort to reduce air pollution by many policies. Right. Clean Air Act is very successful, but because of climate change and that wildfire could offsite the effort of Clean Air Act and talking to the future. So you know, the IPCC has developed many climate models globally to try to pre-project how temperature or climate factors as well as air pollution, could change in the next 50 or 100 years later. And what they find is that the pollution level can go high if there's no ending control on human activity. 80 or like human emissions, right? So, but they also simulate like, if people can control the greenhouse gasses, which is the leading cause of increased temperature. So, if they can control the greenhouse the emission of greenhouse gasses in different levels, then it's possible that temperature will go down in many years, and also the clean air. We can still see it's all about the like interactions between human efforts and the climate.

Vennela Damarla: 5:41

Thank you. Dr. Wang, and I would completely agree with you regarding the wildfire, and this is the topic that you've been teaching us in the class too. So yeah, moving on to the next question. Could you briefly elaborate on how prolonged exposure to air pollutants such as ozone pm 2.5 and nitrous oxide affects lung health and function.

Dr. Meng Wang: 6:07

Yeah. So usually, when we talk about air pollution, we say that air pollution have two effect. One is called a shorthand effect. Another one is called long term effect. The shorthand effect, in fact, it's like when air pollution goes high very rapidly, like wildfire event, then people may get disease immediately, right? And that is really because people already have some pre-existing disease. So we call it like a harvest of human but for long term effect air pollution, just because everyone breathes air, right? So it's kind of explored to take life long. Many studies have already find that. So if people persist the exposed to air pollution for many years, it's possible that the pollution could increase their risk from the beginning for the healthy people, and then gradually increase their biological pathways and clinical symptoms and eventually increase the disease and come back to the respiratory disease. Actually, you can see that air pollution usually enters our bodies through respiratory system, right through respiratory tract. Respiratory disease definitely is most directly impacted by air pollution in terms of the pollutant. Though we know that particulate matter, and also our most important one. Particulate matter is important because they are so tiny that they can easily enter into our respiratory tract. The train here area is more like the connection between the lung and our circulation system. So once this, if the particles are more enough, it can enter into our circulation system. And of course, cardiovascular disease, that means that particulate matter not holding a factor with BFP disease, but also increased risk of cardiovascular disease back to Otto. So autumn is the gas pollutant. So autumn is usually enters into our affecting our lung. But OM is very active pollutant. It's easily interact with other pollutant. So there's once Otto enters into our respiratory tract. It can cause lots of chemistry happen in our lung. So this chemistry may release a new pollutant and then increase the risk of our lung disease. So this is a basic understanding for now in terms of how, PM, 2.9 organ may cause respiratory disease.

Vennela Damarla: 9:05

Well, I really appreciate how you have detailed everything. Dr. Wang, so which pollutant do you think have a stronger association with lung disease progression compared to other pollutants?

Dr. Meng Wang: 9:20

So I would say that I cannot make a judgment so far. So you can see that different studies have different findings. Some studies, they find that PM, 2.5 may be the most important one. Some define also, or some study defined WC or other pretense. So that's really depending on the population, study area and also monitoring technology, Explorer assessment, I would say particulate matter, fine particulate matter, or maybe the most important risk factor for respiratory disease so far. Up because there's many studies have shown this consistently show this results. 

Vennela Damarla: 10:07

Okay, so you have mentioned about the long term effects as well as the short term effects of air pollution. So how do you think the long term effects of cumulative exposure to air pollutants differ from the short term impacts of acute exposure on respiratory health?

Dr. Meng Wang: 10:25

Yeah, that's a great question. Usually, if we think about shorthand exposure, we compare. So if we think about shorthand exposure, we compare whether the exposure on the day that has a high level of pollution, as more people get disease, compared to the day another day, next to the day before and after this day Where the concentration is low, lower number of people get delays. So that is comparison of understand the shorthand effect of air pollution. I would say that shorthand effect happens because air pollution, important air pollution events happen. So some days when pollution happens, high pollution level in certain days and another days it goes up. So in that way, when the concentration immediately gets high. So people who has disease already respiratory disease, for example, so they will not tolerant to that high level of pollution, and then it's possible that they may get immediate disease sequence. So one several typical examples would be like people who had a COPD, they may have severe symptoms, getting more severe recipients during the high level pollution days, and then this may cause them to go to the hospital immediately, or go to the or more severely, may cause people die. So all this happened at very short time period, but it usually affects the people who already have pre-existing disease, or had a like low immune system, right? Or have some Alexa sample population, but long term, back to the long term exposure to air pollution and health. This is maybe different to mechanism. So long term exposure, we don't consider like extreme air pollution event. It's more like a average exporter over long term period. So it's like people always we compare people living in high pollution area to the people who live in low exposure location area, and follow them up and say, better they develop these disease so, because it's follow so long period, and people can be from air pollution And gradually increase their for example, their like biological response, for example, like without it, can increase the risk of inflammation, passive stress, and this inflammation, if it's keep going on the inflation and lead to certain subclinical diseases. So for example, their lung function may go down, their blood pressure may go up, right? And these are the like preclinical, subclinical symptoms. So for respiratory disease, one typical example is emphysema. Emphysema is a structure change of their lung, so once it happened, it's not reversible, right? And and also for cardiovascular disease, we have a term called as those sclerosis, meaning that the plug build up in cables vessels, and when it gets more serious, the plot cannot be removed, right? Unless you take us surgery. So this is how air pollution can gradually affecting the development of disease.

Vennela Damarla: 14:26

So do you think short term exposure to air pollution with the pre-existing conditions can cause irreversible lung damage?

Dr. Meng Wang: 14:35

It's possible. I would say that, like I said, when short term air pollution event happens. It can worsen the lung disease or lung structure in that way. I say it's possible to cause some in reversible disease, but not like long train exposure, because the very support disease.

Vennela Damarla: 15:01

What were the most surprising findings regarding the association between the air pollution and lung health in your study?

Dr. Meng Wang: 15:09

Let me first introduce the study a little bit. So this is a multi side study in United States. So United States, we select 680s and then each city recruit 1000 people, starting from 2000 and follow them up all the way until 2020, so it's like a 20 years follow up period. And during this period, people will take CT scans apart about every four or five years and also take lung function test at the same time. So it's like a repeat measurement over time. The good thing of this study this size, like it's longitudinal follow up study with repeat measurement, so you can really track the progression of lung disease over time. So using CT scan, it can use physiological technology, quantify the area where the lung has abnormal change, have normal change, can be converted to this decide whether or severe the Emma sigma symptom is. So the larger area the abnormal area is, then the most Emma sigma is we expect. So in this case, we can see that the whole the emphysema progress over time and in the meantime. So the group I working with at University of Washington, we developed high resolution air pollution model. High Resolution means that it can predict air pollution bi weekly, and also at every single location of the participants. So each participant will assign unique Data Explorer value to them, so we can really track their air pollution data longitudinally for these participants as well. So both explorer and outcomes are longitudinal data, so we can link them together to see okay whether people living or exposed to high level of air pollution in this area also has faster progression of emphysema over these 20 years and yeah. So we focus on several key proteins. One is PM, 2.5 or five particulate matter. Second one is an o2, oxides of nitrogen, which is indicator of traffic emission. Third one is autumn, which is a secondary pollutant, very important to respiratory disease, and the last one is black carbon. So surprisingly, we actually find that all these pollutants at baseline are associated with faster progression of eczema over time. So baseline explorer means that the Explorer level assigned to the time as a time when people are recruited in 2000 so what it means is that at the time, if people exposed to high levels of game, 2.5 or ozone, for example, at the beginning, in early years, when they recruit this impact could be lifelong, already impacted their progression over time. So this is important, because you know that air pollution goes down right? So this means that people, like older people, may not really get benefit from really get benefit from clean air at the beginning, so at that time, the the bad air and already trigger their respiratory disease. 

Vennela Damarla: 19:16

Well, your study also tells that while concentration of particulate matter 2.5 and oxides of nitrogen decreased during the study, but ozone levels remain a concern. So what factors do you think that contribute to the increased level of ground level ozone?

Dr. Meng Wang: 19:34

Yeah, so this, this is good question, and also complicated story. This is back. We'll be back to talk a little bit background about atmospheric chemistry. So you know, for fine particulate matter, I would just say at least a half of the particular PM, 2.5 man made sources like. Our vehicle emissions, our industry emissions, cooking, all generated particles. But autumn is different. Autumn is a secondary pollutant, which means that their product formation of autumn is not dependent on the lack of a man made emission. It's based on the chemistry. It's a product of primary pollutants like pm, 2.5 oxides of nitrogen, this pollutant. So if the Clean Air Act, basically the at the beginning is to control memory sources. But if you control memory sources, you control the emissions from pollutant generated from memory sources such as oxygenator such as oxides of nitrogen, but you cannot control OSM because ozone is not directly needed by the any of these manmade sources actually back to the chemistry. So autumn formation is very complicated, but in some circumstances, lower level of oxides of nitrogen and increase the level of autumn. So that's why control also. It's very challenging so far, even though in the US there's many policies to control autumn, but it's very difficult. You can imagine, like during the COVID pandemic, there's many industries. There are many people do not come out, so they do not drive and we have significant reduction of traffic emission, they will get better, much better air quality in terms of PMG on the fire size, nitrogen. On the other hand, we have a worsened ozone situation during this period. So it's complicated story back in in terms of chemistry and when link this flu trend to health effect, then that could be different mechanism as well. 

Vennela Damarla: 22:11

Yes, so despite the alarming findings, what gives you the hope for improving the lung health outcomes in the context of raising air pollution levels.

Dr. Meng Wang: 22:21

I would say that overall air pollution, air quality is getting better overall, but we do see that it's unevenly distributed or anchored, disproportionately affecting different people, especially some like low income communities, they are historically exposed to close to industry or like those two traffic area, so their pollution level may not really receive the adequate benefit from the Clean Air Act. So in that way, their air pollution level may not really goes down that rapidly, and their health effect may be of concern now in the United States, and back to the what we can do to improve lung health. So I think there are two aspects we need to think about. One is the policy this level of policy makers, they may the policy should focus more on this, like vulnerable population, underserved community, this population, not focus on everyone, like previously in the act. It's like overall entire country, but now it should be more specifically focused on underserved community to reduce their level of solution. So we can see that many sponsors like the EPA and I actually invest the money to find to help communities to improve their resilience to air pollution. One thing they can do is that have education to people, because people in there, they may not well educated, knowing how to if air pollution event happens, what we should do, right? So like normally, if wildfire comes, then people will receive alert. They will have access to internet, watch TV, and then they know that, okay, next day, the model will have wildfires that we need to do something. But for low income communities, they may not know this they may not have access to know this knowledge. So in that way, the government should have some policies to help them increase their alert to this event, helping them, giving them resource to get access to this alert. On the other hand. I think the prevention could be at an individual level. Air purifier has many studies have evidence that air purifier can reduce air pollution, especially particulate matter, very effectively. But the problem is that this technology only be applied quite a lot of high income communities, but for low income communities, people may not afford this air purifier, but luckily, now there are some studies trying to build up like the DIY air purifiers. It's very simple. You just use the future air filter, built up a box and then attach a box fan. This could be a very simple air purifier, but more efficient than commercial one, and it cost like 1/3 or half price of the commercial air purifier. This is a very good example may be possibly used to increase people's health in terms of recipient days.

Vennela Damarla: 26:11

Yeah, so DIY, air purifier, this is something new that I've learned today. Dr Wong, so the population such as, have low income communities and the population living near industries. How do you protect this population from air pollution? What can be done?

Dr. Meng Wang: 26:33

Like I said, this effort that should be done by both policy makers and individual like community residents. So now we have some studies find we have some connections with the Buffalo African American community, and we know that they are living close to many of the communities are close to major road or too close to highway. So what we are hoping to do is that, first to increase their education level, like holding some event to the community, and to introduce, like, given a background about air pollution, what is so in that way, when air pollution event comes, they can know about this. And also, another way to do is like people. The problem for people is that they don't know their explorer level, what the exposure level is. So our pilot study is doing now is to give them the low sub cost sensor and monitor. The local sensor monitor is cheap, like a 30 to 50 bucks, but it can visualize the readings of levels of evolution as well as the color to indicate like green, yellow, red to indicate whether they should be concerning about their indoor air quality. So in that way, we hope that this will help the community people to get early alert of their indoor air quality problem, and we also try to use, like I mentioned, a DIY air purifier to see how effective it is to improve their health. And what's normal, I think now in this study, is that we notice that the sample population, for example, we typically focus on elderly participants. Elder participants, they they may have, like a decline memory, so they may not really know that. Okay, I should check the air sensor readings and when should I turn it on? When should I turn it off? There's really a lot of burden on them, so what we do is that we do it like a smart control system. We can use the air sensor to determine when we can switch on, switch off, their blog, and the plug will connect to the beautiful air purifier. So everything could be automatic, so we can set up a safety level to them. Once the level is above the safety level, then automatically turn on the air purifier. So in that way, we hope that this can help people, especially older people, or the self population, improving their health.

Vennela Damarla: 29:46

Well, moving on to the next question, so how effective would be the Clean Air Act? You think the Clean Air Act would help people to protect from the air pollution with pre-existing. Conditions, respiratory conditions, older individual and people from low socio economic status?

Dr. Meng Wang: 30:08

Yes, so I want to say that the original design of Clean Air Act is trying to reduce the overall emission of air pollution. That's including the traffic industry, everything this, because there's many policies behind it trying to reduce the manmade emission so the fusion level goes down rapidly, I would say over the past 30 years. Yeah, so like 30 years ago, the pm treatment level could be about over 50 microgram per cubic meter. Now it's below 10. So it's a remarkable achievement to the air pollution. So definitely I believe that because air pollution goes down so much, so much so there's a huge benefit on respiratory health. And actually some studies already evident your evidence. For example, one study conducted in California works on children's health. So recruited school children in elementary school and in seven sites, and then they follow them up for multiple years, and they check whether reduced air pollution is associated with better lung function, increase the lung function. And they did find a significant association, and that's very encouraging and clear evidence supporting that a clean air effect is very effective, but back to like the benefit applied to everyone, but not equally applied to everyone. So some places may have, for example, far away from the sources, may have less issue, but other resources, lots of communities near industry and that, so they also need to consider about the economics. So in that way, there's always fight between industry and the local community, the main the industry may not want to reduce their emission a lot, but community people concerned about it. So this about environmental justice issue remains, still remains in the United States, and that's also one of the most important topic. 

Vennela Damarla: 32:44

Now, okay, so what do you think are the biggest misconceptions about the effects of air pollution and health and how can we educate the public?

Dr. Meng Wang: 32:55

But what I can say, one thing probably people may overlook or negligible is that? So in some areas where air pollution is low, people may feel that they are pretty safe. There's no problem. Air pollution has no effect on them at all, that they don't care about air pollution at all. I think on one hand, it's good that air pollution is air quality is good. They may have other environmental issue that they can they should be careful. But on another hand, current studies, they did not find, suggest that there's a safe threshold of air quality, of air pollution health. It means that even air pollution level is very low, there's a still adverse effect on human health. We cannot say that. Okay, air pollution below five microgram per kilometer, you don't need to care about it. There's no impact on you. Even it's lower, still have impact. It's like pathogenic compounds. You know that's constant. Genetic compound may cause cancer no matter how low the level is, and always cause cancer. Have agreed, can always increase the risk of cancer. Thing for air pollutant, we cannot say that, okay, areas are pretty air quality are pretty good, and then people don't need to care about it. So I think that's something we need to educate people that air pollution should always be care about, even though you are in a clean air location.

Vennela Damarla: 34:45

Yes. Doctor Wang noted, like you said, even the air pollution is lower, it can have an impact in a long run, yeah. So in your view, how significant is the role of ambient air pollution as a risk? Factor for chronic lung diseases compared to other known risk factors, such as smoking or occupational hazards.

Dr. Meng Wang: 35:09

Yeah, so I would say that that's depending on what's the level of population you mentioned about. So if we talk about individual level, like for single people, maybe many other factors. Smoking may be very important risk factor for these people. And if people have poor dare to have it, they may there may be a big problem. But when we talk about population level, meaning that including all the people, putting all the people together, and put and then we reckon the risk based on differential risk factors, then air pollution would be top leading factors. So the long set general, you know loan set is like the top medical general, set general release, the top rank the risk factors that cause people dying every two or three years. And if you read the long set general, you will see that the ranking of air pollution, typically, PMG point goes up year by year. So like five years ago when I read the long set general five Part Two, the matter already ranked as number five of risk factor that may cause people time. The reason is that, or I would say that opposite is the risk factors are smoking, like blood high blood pressure, so all these traditional risk factors. The reason why air pollution because so many people die, but its level is actually low. The reason is really because all the people are exposed to air pollution compared to a few people mode. So because everyone are exposed to air pollution, potentially, the number of people get disease could be substantial. If you sum up these people who get disease as number could be really huge. And also then, if you look at the ranking in the most recent year, actually, image open the file is now top one or top two. So it's now the top of top of the top is the ranking of this risk factors. So the reason for it, in my understanding, is that many of the traditional risk factors has better control because people know how to do it, and it's very effective now, adding more effective now, and we have, like, a smoking control policy, and we have a better health care so in that way, traditional risk factors has been controlled, and the people get this disease because of the stresses factor. But now for air pollution, even though air pollution level goes down, also in many developed countries, I would say, not all the countries, but the population size going up, so it's offset the benefit of air pollution. So eventually the number of people die because of air pollution has been the ranking go up. Okay, so I hope I explained this clear.

Vennela Damarla: 39:04

Yes, Dr. Wang, you, you have explained it very clearly. You have mentioned that PM, 2.5 is the leading air pollutant right now. So are there any measures taken to control a PM, 2.5 air pollutant?

Dr. Meng Wang: 39:21

Yes, so PM, 2.5 is not like a new star. It's like an old friend for us for many years. So I would say that probably 1980s so there's the first study called the Harper six city study. That study, they identified that the five particulate matter is strongly associated with mortality in a cohort study. From there, people know that particulate matter is um. Important risk factor. And from then on, many studies prove this concept. And then EPA realized this problem. So for the Clean Air Act, controlling PM, 2.05 is one of the major task. So I would say that in the United States control. PM, 2.5 this effort keep going on for many years. There's lots of policies at like federal level, state level and country level, community level, individual level to control the pm 2.54

Vennela Damarla: 40:44

It's really awful to know that pm 2.5 is increasing mortality rate. And it's also good to know that there have been a lot of measures and efforts by the government and then acts and policies to control this. So despite the challenges presented by the air pollution, what gives you hope for the future of lung health and public policy?

Dr. Meng Wang: 41:08

Yeah, I would say that the current policies are still effective in reducing em 3.5 so now you know that the standard, the pm 2.5 standard, by EPA, become more rigorous every 10 years. So every 10 years, then EPA will re evaluate their policy, the standard, pm 2.5 standard, whether it's adequately protected human health. So very recently, I think this year, EPA updated uscpa updated the pm 2.5 standard, saying that the annual average level of pm 2.5 should be below nine micrograms per cubic meter. Previously the level is 12 microgram per cubic meter. So this is drop. And given that the level is already low, and they still want to reduce this level, so you can see that it's it's like reduce the pollution by 25% it's a very ambitious policy, and I think this policy will making sure that improving Air Quality will still be beneficial to our respiratory health, cardiovascular health, human health. Well, on the other hand, I think even though, in addition to the policy, the classic or traditional policy, like traditional source of air pollution, we may think more about controlling new source of pollution. Like I mentioned, how we can control climate change. We can slow down the climate global warming this step, just like I said, climate change have indirect impact on air quality. So for example, now government has some policies other than carbon neutralization. It's basically to reduce the carbon consumption, and in that way, the emission of greenhouse gasses will be controlled and the temperature, hopefully the temperature will be flattened out or go down in the future, and then in that way, solution level goes down, in the same case of the greenhouse gasses. So that's another angle I think should be care about myself, air pollution control and the beneficial to respiratory disease.

Vennela Damarla: 44:06

Thank you, Dr. Wang for providing a great summary. So what final advice would you give to our listeners about protecting their families from air pollution?

Dr. Meng Wang: 44:17

Yeah, so for families, I think I would suggest that everyone should know some basic about air quality. First, we should know that everyone are exposed to air pollution. So if there are many resources, actually, the researchers, government are making effort to provide many resources to community residents, helping them to understand what's the level it is. I can come up some resources, hopefully can be helpful. So one is that uscp have website. It showing the level of air pollution based on their air monitoring stations there, and when you train station will join visualize the level of pollution. For example, in New York State, the US, nysdc, they have a website, and they keep updating the level of air pollution hourly. So this could be a resource to look at, okay, whether your residential location is safe or not. Another resource is that, like the US, CDC and EPA, they develop some map for the environmental justice map or social vulnerability index map. So what this map is useful is that it gives you every single community some the information about what's the leading environmental risks are in this community, because not all the communities have the same environmental problem. Some community may have problem of noise. Explore. Some of them may have like air pollution. Some of them may have like the waste water, for example. So this map will giving you a sense about what's the problem in your environmental problem in your community. This will help people to understand this. And another one, I would suggest, is that if people identify that air pollution is a problem, or you're concerning about air pollution problem, the easiest way is to use air purifier. It's very effective to remove air pollution. And also, there's now several community organizations invest they are helping residents to solve the environmental problems. So there are many approaches hopefully can help the family to first know their risk of air pollution, Second, take actions to prevent air pollution. So

Vennela Damarla: 47:09

Are there any final concluding thoughts you would want to share with us Dr. Wang?

Dr. Meng Wang: 47:14

Well, I would say that air pollution is always a problem, but the problem of air pollution as angle has been shifting from traditional industrial control towards Eco community problem of air pollution, then not towards climate change, impact on air pollution and the human health. So it's like, keep going on story, and we are making effort to understand the problem, helping people to solve their problem and hopefully to improve their health.

Vennela Damarla: 48:02

Thank you so much. Dr. Wang, it's been really an insightful session. Stay tuned for another episode on Buffalo HealthCast. Thank you.