By: Aparna Dhulipala
It has long been known that the health of the environment is inextricably linked to the health of humankind. Emerging research continues to reveal the health consequences of anthropogenic changes to the environment. Organ damage caused by contaminated drinking water, lung issues caused by air pollution, and heat stress caused by rising temperatures are all examples of how a changing climate and growing industrial activity are harming human health.
Residents of the Cape Fear River region are particularly familiar with these dangers. In 2017, people were shocked to discover that a corporation had been dumping toxic PFAS chemicals into the community’s main water source for decades. Although the full extent of their effect is unclear, these chemicals have been proven to be carcinogenic, and communities today continue to grapple with the long-term implications of this contamination.
Dr. Nishad Jayasundara, a Wilmington resident and assistant professor of Global Environmental Health at Duke University, is one of the researchers working to shed light on these kinds of issues. He completed his PhD at Stanford University and now specializes in environmental toxicology, a distinct field that studies how chemical contaminants in the environment affect the health of humans and wildlife.
Environmental toxicology is unique in the sense that it focuses only on chemicals that you’ve been exposed to in variable amounts through your environment. “For example, if you’re walking through the street and you’re exposed to air pollution, the study of how those chemicals affect your lung function is environmental toxicology,” he says. “But if you take a drug, and that’s to cure a disease that somebody’s experiencing, the study of the impact of that drug is called toxicology and pharmacology. So that’s no longer environmental, that’s more the study of kinetics that’s happening inside your body in a controlled system.”
His main body of research has occurred in his home country of Sri Lanka, where he worked to establish the connection between certain agricultural chemicals and kidney disease. He first learned of this issue through newspapers he read during visits back home, and after noticing this pattern occur in other parts of the world, he began to pay more attention. After analyzing the existing body of work on the subject, he ended up focusing his research on how heat stress and chemical contaminants were affecting kidney health in children and adults in the impacted communities.
During this research, Dr. Jayasundara worked closely with Sri Lankan communities to pinpoint the causes of health issues. He stresses the importance of a “bidirectional relationship” in this type of work, where “your presence in the community is not felt as someone coming in for extraction purposes and leaving the community that will enhance [your] career. You have to do this kind of work in a way that benefits this community.” In order to facilitate this kind of relationship, he and his team set up a non-profit to benefit community members, as well as mutually-beneficial partnerships between Duke University and the University of Ruhana, where the study took place.
The response to his findings has been largely positive, he reports. However, according to Dr. Jayasundara, “there’s a lot of debate in the scientific community based on our findings to figure out if what our group is finding is the cause of this disease in Sri Lanka, and if it's not the cause, are we going down the wrong path and spending resources on the wrong path?” Nevertheless, “my response to that always is as long as what we do leads to provision of a clean environment to the community, it doesn’t matter that it is not the cause of the disease,” he says.
Dr. Jayasundara will soon be conducting some research closer to home. He was recently the co-recipient of a grant to map lithium toxicity in North Carolina. “The lithium study got funded because there is going to be an EV (electric vehicle) car manufacturing plant set up in North Carolina, and there’s also potential lithium mining that may happen here, so we’re interested in setting up a baseline lithium level monitoring network for now, so that in the future we’ll have that information available, if lithium contamination were to become a problem,” he says.
He is also the recipient of a grant from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality to research the impact of PFAS on fish in the Cape Fear River. Fish are of particular interest to his lab, as they provide a model for the lab to gauge the impacts of a certain chemical. “One of the biggest challenges in environmental toxicology is it’s an uncontrolled experiment to study humans, because we live very diverse lifestyles, even within members of the same household,” he says. This makes controlled lab studies very important, as model systems can be used to discern the exact impacts of chemicals in a short window of time in a large pool of animals.
Finally, Dr. Jayasundara says the most important thing he’d like for people to understand is the power they have to make change. “I think talking to our local policy-makers is absolutely critical, and that’s something I keep saying in Sri Lanka and the United States,” he says. “The more locally organized and informed communities are about the contamination problems and worsening environmental problems in their community, the more they are able to directly influence local policy-makers to create change.”
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