Mapping Environmental Health

Marie Lynn Miranda Uses Geospatial Technologies to Protect Our Children

by Scottee Cantrell

These days maps can be amazing tools. They aren’t just those overly large pieces of paper that you fold out to plot your vacation trip anymore.

With GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology, maps can be combined with layers of data to reveal information that might ultimately contribute to such things as predicting your child’s risk of exposure to environmental toxins.

If you live in Durham, for instance, Marie Lynn Miranda can bring up a map of your neighborhood and tell you how old your house is, if you rent or own, and if your children have had blood screening for lead.

More importantly, the Nicholas School professor and her research team in the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative have developed a methodology that can combine all those factors and determine your children’s exposure risk to lead.

And right now, she is working with 11 health departments covering 16 North Carolina counties to help them utilize this GIS technology so they can launch preventive programs in your neighborhoods where children are at risk, not only for lead, but for allergens and asthma, pesticides and industrial contaminants.

She’d like to see the GIS analysis used in all 100 counties, and it’s not inconceivable that it could become a standard tool for health departments nationwide.

“Now we wait for children to get sick, and then we go into their home environments, into their schools, into their day care centers, and we try to figure out what made them sick. That’s the equivalent of using them as little canaries in the coal mine, or little biosensors in their environment, said Miranda, who is the Dan and Bunny Gabel Associate Professor of the Practice in Environmental Ethics and Sustainable Environmental Management.

“What I think we should be doing instead is having preventive programs where we figure out what are the locations and the kind of places most likely to give kids the exposures that will make them sick, and let’s go in and clean them up before the kids get sick. Let’s let children be children and canaries be canaries.”

Children are especially vulnerable to environmental toxins because they behave differently from adults, and they are growing: They spend a lot more time crawling around on the floor. They don’t wash their hands carefully. They put things in their mouths. “So, they probably get exposed to a lot more stuff because of the way they navigate through the world,” said Miranda.

What makes toxins a triple threat for them is at the same time that they move differently through the world their metabolism is higher—so they take in more, faster than adults—and they are still developing. “They breathe more air per volume of body weight than you do; they take in more calories; they take in more water; they do not have fully mature reproductive systems; they do not have fully mature central and peripheral nervous systems; they do not have a fully mature immune system. Because of that, if they are exposed to the same chemicals as adults, they are more likely to express toxic effects.”

Brian Letourneau, health director of the Durham County Health Department, said his lead team will launch a multi-pronged community lead prevention strategy this fall using Miranda’s GIS model.

“The beauty of it is that it is a way to target individual homes rather than blanket a community; we can target our resources to specific addresses at high risk,” he said.

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