Mission Statement

Our mission is to engage an interdisciplinary team of researchers to assess and understand the risk to human health of exposure to heavy metals, such as lead and arsenic, and to other toxins such as PCBs. The heavy metals and toxins that we study are often present in hazardous waste areas designated as Superfund sites.

Our goal is to be able to provide:

• clear indicators for the determination of health risks posed by exposure to certain metals and toxins in hazardous waste sites; improved diagnosis and treatment for those who have been exposed; better tools for the assessment of the risk posed by hazardous waste sites; and
• better processes for remediation of those sites.

Our research integrates the fields of exposure assessment (who is exposed, at what dose), biologic pathogenesis (the disease process), and epidemiologic studies (what illnesses are present in the study populations). Several research projects are related to exposures of concern at a Superfund site in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and low levels of exposure receive as much attention as high levels of exposure. The model we work from can be summarized as follows:

Environmental contamination -> human exposure -> human dose -> altered susceptibility -> human disease