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Faculty News

Recent Grants and Contracts

The following grants and contracts support faculty research at the School of Public Health: California Public Health Laboratory Director Training Program

Team Nutrition: Local Wellness Demonstration Project Evaluation

$4,600,000 (over five years) from the California Department of Health Services

$168,632 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and California Department of Education

PI: Gertrude Buehring, Ph.D. The major components of this program include support for doctoral students (Dr. P.H. and Ph.D.), support for postdoctoral positions, assistance to state and county public health labs and to employ the graduates in paid positions. Other aspects include strengthening of the undergraduate and graduate infectious diseases laboratory courses and outreach at all levels to get people into the pipeline to a career as a public health laboratory director.

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PI: Patricia Crawford, Dr.P.H. ’74, R.D.; Project manager: Gail Woodward-Lopez, M.P.H. ’88, R.D. The Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004 required that each local education agency participating in the National School Lunch establish a school wellness policy by 2006. In order to better understand the extent and processes by which school districts develop and implement these policies as well as to assess

the short term outcomes of the wellness policies, the USDA awarded grants to California, Iowa, and Pennsylvania to evaluate the demonstration project.

Arsenic and Child Respiratory Health in Bangladesh $2,297,877 from the NIH National, Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute PI: Allan H. Smith, M.D., Ph.D. The impact of arsenic ingestion on lung function and respiratory health has so far not been studied in children. Smith and his team plan to study 300 children, aged 6 to 16 years, from Bangladeshi families in which at least one member of the family has developed arsenic-related skin lesions.

Faculty News

Most of these families use tubewell water with arsenic concentrations of over 300 ug/L. An unexposed comparison group of 300 children will be selected from Bangladeshi families with no skin lesions, who use tubewell water containing arsenic concentrations of less than 50 ug/L. Lung function and respiratory symptoms, including chronic cough and shortness of breath, will be assessed in relation to current and past arsenic concentrations in all sources of drinking water throughout childhood, including in utero exposure.

Determinants of Schistosomiasis Reemergence $2,295,199 from the NIH/National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases PI: Robert C. Spear, Ph.D. Spear and his team’s long-term objectives for this project are to develop methods for the design of site-specific control programs to achieve the sustainable cessation of transmission and control of Schistosoma japonicum infections in China. The recent reemergence of transmission in formerly controlled Chinese counties has prompted

several hypotheses and utilize a stochastic model of reemergent transmission to explore the effect of chance events on the design of an effective surveillance system.

Fresh Start Evaluation $261,209 from California Department of Education Subcontract PI: Patricia Crawford, Dr.P.H. ’74, R.D.; Project manager: Gail Woodward-Lopez, M.P.H. ’88, R.D. California Fresh Start is a pilot program established by Senate Bill 281 that provides a 10-cent per meal reimbursement to school districts to promote and serve an additional serving of fruits or vegetables in the school breakfast program. The study will evaluate how well the program is working and will identify successful implementation strategies and improvements or additional support that may be necessary to ensure successful implementation.

Research and Training in Environmental and Occupational Health, India $722,500 from the NIH Fogarty International Center PI: Allan H. Smith, M.D., Ph.D.

Spear to study the determinants of this reemergence to inform the design of surveillance programs for the early detection and minimization of the scale and impact of reemergence. The research team will test

The Fogarty Training Program in India, under the direction of Allan Smith and Kirk Smith, has focused on the development of skills and capacity-building for research and interventions concerning the environmental health consequences resulting from widespread arsenic contamination of drinking water (especially in West Bengal), and indoor air pollution from the use of traditional fuels in rural households throughout the country. To address the problem of arsenic-contaminated water, Allan Smith and the research team plan to continue administering their training program with

traditional and molecular epidemiology research studies, including investigations to assess the health impact of early life exposure to arsenic. The team will continue to work with trainees in improving the design of shallow dugwells as a rapidlyimplementable mitigation method to reduce exposure. To address indoor air pollution, Kirk Smith and his collaborators plan to conduct training in both traditional and modern methods of exposure and outcome assessment, as well as further explore the efficacy of such interventions as stoves with highly improved combustion of biomass that will generate less pollution.

Statistical Methods to Study the Epidemiology of HIV and Other Diseases $1,271,337 from the NIH/National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases PI: Nicholas P. Jewell, Ph.D. This project will develop statistical techniques for data on HIV and sexually transmitted infections. A significant challenge is application of causal inference methods to randomized trials for HIV prevention in Africa. Assessment of new interventions— such as microbicides and the diaphragm— are complicated both by concurrent use of traditional prevention methods (e.g. condoms) in both arms of the trial, and by noncompliance with both the primary intervention and other methods. A project theme is the modeling of effects of explanatory factors on time-to-event outcomes with incomplete information and data that is sometimes observational in nature and often high-dimensional. continued on page 44

Public Health

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Faculty News

Recent Grants and Contracts, continued Using Biomonitoring In Environmental Public Health $15,000 from the San Francisco Foundation PI: Amy D. Kyle, Ph.D. ’96, M.P.H. ’92 Kyle and her team are working on a framework and case studies to examine how questions relevant to policy decisions can be answered through biomonitoring. Questions of policy interest include: What chemicals are found in the human body?

Do we know their sources? Do they occur at critical stages of development? Do we see differences over time? Do we see differences by region? Can we identify highly impacted populations? The grant from the San Francisco Foundation will allow the group to work with community-based organizations to examine how their experiences can be integrated into a state biomonitoring program. This work is funded through the Superfund Basic Research Program and the Center for Environmental Public Health Tracking.

benzene on DNA and chromosomal damage in human sperm and will determine the association between chromosomal damage in sperm and blood cells within the same individuals. The study will use samples collected from 34 benzene-exposed male factory workers and 44 controls in Tianjin, China.

contribute to balancing work and family by empowering mothers to succeed at breastfeeding, increasing duration of lactation, and helping infants get a healthy start in life.

It will also identify those vulnerable groups more likely to benefit from existing leave policies available in California.

Balancing Work and Family: The Relationship Between Pre and Postpartum Maternity Leave Arrangements and Breastfeeding

Targeted Empirical Super Learning in HIV Research

$30,000 from the UC Labor and Employment Research Fund PI: Sylvia Guendelman, Ph.D., LCSW This study seeks to examine the relationship between maternity leave arrangements, workplace characteristics, and breastfeed-

$2,302,698 from the NIH/National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases PI: Mark van der Laan, Ph.D. Van der Laan plans to study and extend a general statistical methodology called “targeted empirical learning,” which includes a recently developed “targeted maximum likelihood” methodology. He

Genetic Damage in the Sperm and Blood of Workers Exposed to Benzene $119,966 from the NIH/National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences PI: Brenda Eskenazi, Ph.D. This project is one of the first to investigate the relative sensitivities of sperm and blood cells to chromosomal defects induced by benzene. In collaboration with colleagues from the School of Public Health, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, and the Chinese Center for Disease Control, the researchers will examine the effects of

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University of California, Berkeley

ing initiation and duration among working women in Southern California. Data will be obtained from “Juggling Life and Work During Pregnancy,” a case-control study conducted in Orange, Imperial, and San Diego counties between 2002 and 2003, and weighted to account for study design.

This project will enhance understanding of how maternity leave arrangements may

plans to expand targeted empirical learning into a practical product that be applied to pressing scientific questions. Building on long-standing collaborations with leading scientists in areas of clinical AIDS research, van der Laan and his team will use this novel methodology to address research questions concerning HIV.