Special vulnerability of children to environmental exposures

Environmental exposures and respiratory outcomes in children.

Asthma is a complex condition where genetic and environmental interactions occur at critical periods in development. The focus of this review was the role of environmental exposures on asthma causation. Selected studies published in 2010 and 2011 were reviewed to illustrate the challenge in relating environmental exposure(s) on asthma causation and also to focus on some exposures currently thou...

Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards

Objective. County-level socioeconomic and demographic data were used to construct an index of social vulnerability to environmental hazards, called the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) for the United States based on 1990 data. Methods. Using a factor analytic approach, 42 variables were reduced to 11 independent factors that accounted for about 76 percent of the variance. These factors were pl...

Vulnerability of community businesses to environmental disasters.

Business plays important roles in community functioning. However, disaster research has been disproportionately focused on units of analysis such as families, households and government agencies. This paper synthesises the major findings within the business development research field and the disaster research field. It constructs a framework for evaluating business vulnerability to natural disas...

Epigenetics and environmental exposures.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that genetic factors are inadequate to fully explain many processes that shape development and disease. For example, monozygotic twin pairs, despite sharing identical DNA sequences, are often discordant for many traits and diseases, indicating that the same genotype can give rise to distinct phenotypes. This points towards the involvement of additional facto...

Transgenerational Effects of Environmental Exposures