Invited Perspective: Integrating Data Reveals Benefits of Remediation for Children’s Exposure to Hazardous Substances

Thousands of contaminated sites exist across the United States, where hazardous wastes were dumped or improperly managed (U.S. EPA 2021a). In 1980, Congress established the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) in response to growing concerns over the health and environmental risks posed by hazardous waste sites. Administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA), CERCLA is commonly known as the Superfund Program. In collaboration with state and tribal governments, the Superfund Program is designed to clean up contaminated media, such as soil, to protect human health and the environment (U.S. EPA 2021a).

Cleaning up Superfund sites is a complex and costly multiphase process, the tangible benefits of which can be challenging to document. In this issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, Ye et al. (2022) combined large data sets of local soil lead levels and children’s blood lead levels to estimate the impact of remediation at the Omaha Lead Superfund Site, one of the largest cleanup efforts in the history of the Superfund Program (U.S. EPA 2021b).

We have known for decades that lead affects neurodevelopment (Bellinger et al. 1987; Needleman et al. 1990), and regulatory standards have made great strides in their efforts to reduce the amount of lead in air, drinking water, soil, and consumer products. To my knowledge, this study is the first to directly link lead soil remediation with reduced exposure in children. This type of analysis is crucial for documenting the public health benefits resulting from cleanup activities to inform decision makers tasked with protecting human health.

This research is a success story with far-reaching implications. The U.S. EPA manages 1,212 sites with lead identified as a contaminant of concern, making it one of the most prevalent contaminants at Superfund sites (U.S. EPA 2019). However, Superfund sites collectively contain hundreds of other hazardous substances that remain to be addressed, including dioxins, chlorinated solvents, pesticides, and others (Watts and Teel 2014).

These sites do not exist in a vacuum. The U.S. EPA estimates that more than $20\text{\hspace{0.17em}million}$ people live within 1 mi of a Superfund site, and approximately $73\text{\hspace{0.17em}million}$ live within 3 mi (U.S. EPA 2020). We must also recognize that communities living near Superfund sites often include more people of color and tend to be lower-income, linguistically isolated, and less highly educated than the U.S. population as a whole (U.S. EPA 2020). Within those communities, children are among the most vulnerable. In Douglas County, Nebraska, where the Omaha Lead Superfund Site is located, 7.4% of the population is under the age of 5 (U.S. Census Bureau 2019). Nationally, 23% of all children under the age of 5 live within 3 mi of a Superfund site (U.S. EPA 2020).

Children and infants are uniquely vulnerable to pollution and other environmental and social factors that may cause serious health problems because their organ, immune, and metabolic systems are still developing. Pound for pound, their exposure to harmful chemicals is greater than that of adults. Children also undergo periods of rapid growth and development, where normal biological processes may be disrupted by environmental chemicals (U.S. EPA 1996).

Environmental health problems, and their solutions, are complex and cross the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Demonstrating the effectiveness of solutions and documenting tangible benefits for human health can be even more intricate. To address these research needs, the Superfund Research Program (SRP) was established at the National Institute of Environmental of Health Sciences (NIEHS) in 1986 under the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act. The SRP funds university-based grants on basic biological, environmental, and engineering processes to find real and practical solutions to exposures to contaminants at hazardous waste sites. These activities complement the work of the U.S. EPA, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and other federal and state agencies.

The U.S. EPA and NIEHS SRP have been at the forefront of pressing environmental health issues, including promoting children’s health (U.S. EPA 1995; Landrigan et al. 1999), addressing environmental health disparities and promoting environmental justice (NIEHS 2015; U.S. EPA 2016), and leveraging advances in data science and data sharing to move research forward and better protect human health (Heacock et al. 2020; NIEHS 2021; U.S. EPA 2021c).

Community partnerships can reveal new insight into local problems and priorities (Trottier et al. 2019). By combining these partnerships with biomedical and environmental science and engineering research, data science, training, and research translation, we can elucidate the complex interactions between factors that contribute to or protect against hazardous substances, identify interventions, and evaluate their effectiveness (Heacock et al. 2020; Suk et al. 2020). Ye et al. (2022) demonstrate the utility of leveraging and combining large data sets from different disciplines, such as medical biomonitoring and soil monitoring data, to reveal stronger evidence supporting the value of cleaning up hazardous substances in the environment.

As we strive to clean up more Superfund sites across the nation, advances in data science and data sharing will continue to reveal new discoveries and tools to support decision makers. By promoting and expanding data science initiatives across disciplines, we will be better positioned to address historical problems (such as lead) and longstanding environmental health disparities (Ramírez-Andreotta et al. 2021), as well as new and emerging challenges, such as shedding light on factors that influence a community’s vulnerability to environmental disasters and climate change (Newman et al. 2021).

Refers to https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP8657