Pollution Comes Home and Gets Personal: Women's Experience of Household Chemical Exposure

Author:

Altman Rebecca Gasior1,Morello-Frosch Rachel2,Brody Julia Green3,Rudel Ruthann4,Brown Phil5,Averick Mara6

Affiliation:

1. Rebecca Gasior Altman earned her PhD from Brown University in 2008. Her dissertation examines how communities and advocacy groups in Appalachia, Maine, and Alaska use biomonitoring to address environmental health and justice. Other research interests track advocacy to correct the environmental health consequences posed by the health care sector.

2. Rachel Morello-Frosch is associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. An epidemiologist and environmental health scientist, her research examines race and class determinants of the distribution of health risks associated with environmental hazards, particularly air pollution, among diverse communities in the United States. Her current work focuses on: the health impacts of ambient air...

3. Julia Green Brody is the executive director of Silent Spring Institute, a nonprofit research organization founded by the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition to study women's health and the environment in a context of partnership between scientists and activists. Recent projects include studies of household exposure to endocrine disruptors, including reporting individual- and community-level results. Her research interests focus on environmental pollutants and breast cancer, and public engagement in...

4. Ruthann Rudel is a leader in exposure, toxicology, and risk assessment related to mammary gland carcinogenesis and endocrine active chemicals. In her role as the senior environmental toxicologist at Silent Spring Institute, she recently directed a major review of animal mammary gland carcinogens that compiled existing research, reviewed key issues in study design, and synthesized exposure information. She also directs the Institute's Household Exposure Studies, which aim to characterize household...

5. Phil Brown is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at Brown University. His most recent book is Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement. His research interests include labor-environment coalitions, health social movements, connections between breast cancer activism and environmental justice, and biomonitoring and household exposure.

6. Mara Averick graduated from Brown University in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in science and society studies. She served as an undergraduate research assistant on this project while also working on her undergraduate thesis, which explored scientists' perceptions of the social and ethical implications of nanotechnology.

Abstract

We report on interviews conducted with participants in a novel study about environmental chemicals in body fluids and household air and dust. Interviews reveal how personal and collective environmental history influence the interpretation of exposure data, and how participants fashion an emergent understanding of environmental health problems from the articulation of science and experience. To the illness experience literature, we contribute a framework for analyzing a new category of embodied narratives—“exposure experience”—that examines the mediating role of science. We update social scientific knowledge about social responses to toxic chemicals during a period in which science alters public understanding of chemical pollution. This article is among the first published accounts of participants' responses to learning personal exposure data, research identified as critical to environmental science and public health. Our findings raise the importance of reporting even uncertain science and underscore the value of a community-based reporting strategy.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health,Social Psychology

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