Laboratories around the world are using the zebrafish model for biomedical research and conducting investigations using morphological, physiological, behavioral, and genomic endpoints. All assays provide information, but physiological and behavioral endpoints or phenotypes are a fast way to understand how an animal is responding to its environment. We investigate the...
The Self-indicating Instant Radiation Alert Dosimeter, SIRAD™,
manufactured by JP Labs*, is a dosimeter that can be used by emergency response
persoimel. It is a user-friendly, inexpensive, and disposable radiation dosimeter. It
monitors high doses, 5-200 rads, of ionizing radiation. The card resembles the size of a
credit card and...
The advances in the nuclear sciences over the past sixty years have yielded many beneficial technologies and applications, such as power generation, food irradiation, and medical diagnostic devices and techniques. However, these advances have also allowed the advent of nuclear and radiological weapons. This paper will focus on one type...
Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a seafood-borne pathogen that can cause gastroenteritis in humans. This study investigated the effectiveness of refrigerated seawater (5°C) depuration on reducing V. parahaemolyticus in raw Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas). Raw Pacific oysters were inoculated with a mixed culture of five clinical strains of V. parahaemolyticus and depurated...
Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is a critical component of the carbon cycle linking terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Although many factors influence DOM fluxes and quality in rivers, controls on DOM compositions in catchments of the western U.S. are poorly understood. UV and fluorescent spectroscopy is a simpler, faster, and less...
Osteoporotic vertebral fractures are a common and costly public health problem with a high occurrence in older women due to menopausal-onset bone loss. Recent findings suggest that mechanical loading created by upper body resistance training can stimulate bone growth in the lumbar spine, reducing osteoporosis-related bone loss and associated fracture...
West Nile Virus (WNV), a vector-borne disease continues to be a serious threat to public health in the United States, particularly in the Southwest region. While all the states in the U.S. experienced a decreasing trend of WNV disease in 2010, the state of Arizona experienced a sharp increase from...
American Indians presently face health risks posed by exposure to environmental pollutants through different exposure routes including: inhalation (e.g., air particles), ingestion (e.g., fish, water), and dermal contact (e.g., contact with water, soil). Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are increasingly being used in the Environmental Health arena as a tool for...
The aim of this study was to assess sensitivity of early life stage zebrafish to cadmium (Cd). Embryos and larva were exposed to Cd before the formation of skeletal elements. Exposure times were selected to determine whether Cd perturbed developmental processes that lead to skeletal deformities, and to characterize the...
Growing urbanization, shifting water uses, and a focus on ecosystem health in the Deschutes River Basin in Central Oregon led to experimentation with new voluntary market-based approaches to water management in the last decade. To meet groundwater demands while maintaining instream flows and upholding prior water allocations, the Oregon Water...
In this dissertation, I explored how social relationships influence, and are influenced by, men's experiences of caregiving to their aging parents. Because of sociodemographic trends such as fewer siblings in younger generations and the growth of women seeking professional careers, men are increasingly likely to be called upon to meet...
Reports of foodborne outbreaks have increased in the last decade, posing a public health risk to consumers. In an attempt to mitigate this risk, the newly established Food Safety and Modernization Act (FSMA) takes a preventive rather than reactive approach to food safety. Under FSMA, producers are required to validate...
The Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector of international development works to increase access to sustainable, safe water and improved sanitation. Currently, at least 780 million people live without clean drinking water and 2.5 billion without access to improved sanitation (UNICEF & World Health Organization, 2012). Lack of access to...
In 1993 and 1994 total, there were 247 people reported to have been bitten by animals in Benton County, Oregon. Of the 243 biting animals, 70 percent were dogs, 25 percent cats, and 5 percent other animals such as ferrets, mice, rats, bats, and skunks. Fifty-four percent of all bites...
Legislation can be an effective public health tool, and understanding the factors that influence legislative outcomes is advantageous for public health practitioners who propose and advocate for legislation. The literature indicates that the issues of personal freedoms, the presence or absence of strong coalition leadership, and political conditions and ideology...
Using GIS, this study creates a predictive model of a distinct population of French-Canadian settlers, highlighting shared environmental characteristics of known sites that may have factored into their decision-making process as they chose locations for their farmsteads. While traditional historic and archaeological research has been conducted on French Prairie, the...
This research was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of two different types of
alcohol education interventions on the attitudes about alcohol consumption in college,
knowledge about alcohol, and self-reported alcohol consumption behavior of college
students. The educational interventions were a student-centered CD-Rom interactive
program, and a teacher-centered motivational speaker. Each...
This dissertation draws on ethnographic data and political ecological theory to analyze the experience of residents living in the IBM-Endicott Superfund site in Endicott, New York. Combining in-depth narratives and quantitative measures from a household survey, it highlights residents' perceptions of 1) environmental health risk, 2) risk mitigation, 3) deindustrialization...
Calcium is important to bone health as well as related to a number of health problems such as osteoporosis, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. Calcium intake level was far below the Dietary Reference Intake and dairy product consumption was inconsistent with the Daily Dietary Guidelines among adolescents in Taiwan...
Protection of the quality and integrity of food supplies is of global concern. Crops can accumulate non-nutritive and sometimes toxic metals and metalloids. Accumulated metals/metalloids can come in part, from fertilizers, which may contain variable levels of non-nutritive metals or metalloids such as arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), nickel...
The XEPHWICH system is a phoswich type (multiple scintillator) radiation
detector designed to detect several radioxenon isotopes with the goal of identifying covert
nuclear explosions. The XEPHWICH system is designed with the sole purpose of
replacing the Automated Radio-xenon Sampler/Analyzer (ARSA) in the United Nation's
(UN) Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty's...
Biological agents and their products commonly cause foodborne illnesses. In the United States it is estimated that there are over 76 million cases of foodborne illnesses each year, resulting in an economic loss of approximately $40 billion. These high figures demonstrate the need for bioassays that display a rapid and...
Former industrial or commercial sites that have been left unused are typically referred to as brownfield sites, or simply, brownfields. Many communities have such properties that are abandoned, idle or underused. Despite public efforts to facilitate brownfields revitalization projects, the rate of remediation remains unexpectedly slow. Efforts to resolve this...
Mercury and arsenic are known developmental toxicants and environmental exposures are ubiquitous worldwide from natural and anthropogenic sources. Prenatal exposure to both contaminants are independently associated with adverse perinatal health outcomes and latent disease risk that could be in part mediated by epigenetic reprogramming events. Fetal programming events involving DNA...
This study focuses on iodine-131 detected in milk samples from the Dairy Science Unit at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, California following events at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant in March of 2011. The samples were collected as part of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant (DCPP) Radiological Environmental...
The purposes of this study were to assess mental
health counselors' knowledge of AIDS and to determine the
effect of various independent variables upon knowledge. The
variables used were gender, professional contact with PWAs,
personal contact with PWAs, age, sexual preference, AIDS
training, and personal acquaintance with a person who...
Wastewater epidemiology is an emerging discipline that requires collaborative research involving analytical chemists, drug epidemiologists, and wastewater engineers. Wastewater epidemiology involves the sampling and quantitative analysis of raw wastewaters from communities for illicit drugs and their metabolites. Mass loads (mass per day) and per capita (mg per day per person)...
microRNAs (miRNAs), ~21-24 nucleotide-long RNAs that post-transcriptionally regulate gene expression, have rapidly become one of the most extensively studied mechanisms of the past decade. Since their discovery as temporal regulators of post-embryonic development in C. elegans, miRNAs have been functionally implicated in almost every cellular process investigated to date. miRNAs...
Two epidemiological studies, designed to expand our knowledge of morbidity and
mortality indicators concerning malaria and Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccination in the
Hospital Albert Schweitzer health district located in Central Haiti's Artibonite Valley, are
presented. The hospital serves a rural population of 190,000 in its 610 square mile
district. A large...
Issues of right to life, as well as death have surfaced as topics of hot debate. In particular, questions about when and if individuals have the right to end their own lives have emerged and gained considerable attention as health policy issues having the potential to affect all Americans..
The...
Dietary excesses and imbalances play a prominent role in five of the ten leading causes of death in the U.S. Recognizing that many Americans tend to have poor dietary habits, the government has implemented several nutrition education strategies. Although these efforts have attempted to improve the nutritional status of Americans,...
The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe and communicate a student-constructed model of student services for electronic distance education (EDE). This study seeks to answer the following questions: Do students enrolled in EDE perceive a need for student services? If not, why not? Which services do students want/need?...
This study was designed to assess chiorpyrifos exposure of a group of farmers by determining internal dose associated with a given application of this insecticide. This involved the monitoring of urinary levels of 3,5,6 trichloro-2-pyridinol (TCP), the major metabolite of chlorpyrifos. Incidental exposure was evaluated by determining the levels of...
The purpose of the study was to set up an in vitro model of the colon which
would permit the analysis of cellulose fermentation by human colonic microflora. Studies
of the degradation of polysaccharides by colonic bacteria may help to explain the observed
physiological consequences of consuming dietary fiber common...
Environment, safety and health (ESH) research has a strong tradition of
conducting research in manufacturing to improve workplace ESH conditions and has
tied its management strategy and technical practices to many significant priorities:
illness and injury prevention, environmental sustainability, corporate social
responsibility, compliance with regulatory and insurance requirements, and dealing...
Waterborne fecal contamination poses serious risks to human health and can disrupt aquatic ecosystems. Molecular marker methods are widely used to identify and, in some cases, quantify the sources of contamination and guide management decisions regarding water resource protection. However, methods to detect some likely sources of fecal contamination such...
The purpose of this study was to describe Iranian immigrant
women's knowledge, beliefs and attitudes towards breast cancer,
and their breast cancer screening behaviors. Specifically, this
research examined the predictors of age-specific breast cancer
screening participation among this population. The participants in
this study consisted (n=34 1) of self-identified first...
Digital Instrumentation and Detection is becoming the future of radiation detection and measurement. Computers are able to perform digitally what before would have taken an extensive array of analog equipment. The art of teaching radiation detection and measurement is following this same pattern of a shift from purely analog to...
High rates and high costs of adolescent pregnancy and school dropout have resulted in the development of many prevention programs; however, little is known about the long-range effectiveness of efforts. Empirical research is needed to document behavioral outcomes over extended periods of time. I interviewed eight young white women who...
This dissertation looks at one landscape component of the Coquille Indian Tribe's ancestral lands in order to understand the place meaning created and assigned to Euphoria Ridge, Oregon. I focus on three cultural overlays across time that together with the unique biophysical components, generate an importance for the locale to...
Due to their unique physical, chemical, and magnetic properties, nanomaterials have great potential for industrial development. There is a pressing need to develop rapid whole animal-based testing assays to assess the potential toxicity of engineered nanomaterials. To meet this challenge the embryonic zebrafish model was employed to determine the toxicity...
Human exposure to the carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) benzo[a]pyrene (B[a]P) and dibenzo[a,l]pyrene (DB[a,l]P) is through environmental complex mixtures, such as urban dust particulate matter (UDPM) and diesel exhaust (DE), however the potency of these PAH within a mixture is not established. To determine the effect of these mixtures on...