UW rewarded largest EPA grant ever
August 4, 2004
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) awarded a record-breaking grant last week to UW researchers who hope to pinpoint the relationship between air pollution and heart disease.
The $30 million grant is the largest ever given by the EPA. The grant was awarded to a team of scientists led by Joel Kaufman, an associate professor in the UW department of environmental and occupational health sciences.
"It's kind of intimidating," Kaufman said with a chuckle. "It feels like I know what I'll be doing for a while."
Kaufman and a team of UW researchers will spend 10 years tracking 8,700 people between the ages of 50 and 89 in California, New York, Illinois, North Carolina, Maryland and Minnesota.
"We're looking at developing a system for estimating each subjects' exposure to air pollution," Kaufman said. "We're working in the next few months to finalize protocol."
UW researchers will track the number of heart attacks, strokes and cases of atherosclerosis -- the buildup of plaque in carotid and coronary arteries -- in the subjects. The researchers will observe how air pollution affects the subjects' health.
"I think we'll have better data on air-pollution exposure and cardiovascular disease, and [develop] a precise picture of what is going on as a result," Kaufman said. "I think we'll find more of a relation between heart disease and air pollution than we realized in the past."
The new study is part of the National Institutes of Health's multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis.
According to Kaufman, previous air-pollution studies have focused primarily on lung and respiratory ailments. Connections to heart disease, he said, were found almost accidentally in the course of other research projects.
According to John Puzak, acting director of the EPA's National Center for Environmental Research, scientists are beginning to focus on minute particles of pollution, rather than more sizable chunks, as leading contributors to environment-related health ailments.
"Even the small effect of air pollution has a large impact on society when spread over a large amount of people," said Kaufman.
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