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I'm very excited to introduce some of our speakers these are people that work in the Center for Environmental Health Science Research their investigators so they you know work at the University of Iowa in various capacities and they do research on topics related to environmental health and so this is an opportunity for you guys to practice some of those skills we were talking about in the panel of really listening to some hard science information ingesting it ask questions and and really try to understand and they're gonna communicate what they think are some important environmental health topics so we're starting out today with dr. Peter thorne he is the director of the EH SRC and is a distinguished researcher so he'll be talking a little bit about his experience in the science advisory board for the federal government and then we have dr. Robert Blount he is a medical doctor who's focusing on tuberculosis and then Darren Thompson he is a PhD candidate in the topic of occupational environmental health and he focuses on neonics and that is a really important issue especially for bees and the health of our ecosystem so dr. Thorne all right well thank you Jackie so I decided to give both a lamentation and a tale of moving out of one's comfort zone rather than give a science talk and this stems out of the my experience is working on the science advisory board for the EPA for six years and serving as the chair of that science advisory board this is the principal board that advises the EPA which is a scientific agency and the board is created under two federal laws that we're designed by Congress to ensure that the EPA gets the value of the very best science available in all of their decision-making so we live in interesting times and this is a tale of that and I guess the cartoon says kind of where I am with where we are now in terms of the value of science in the political spectrum so the mission statement when I started working for the EPA is on the top here and the current mission statement is is down there I guess we've dropped the part about air water and land upon which life depends that was too controversial for today's EPA so I served initially under Gina McCarthy who was the EPA administrator appointed by President Obama so she served as shown here until nog the day before inauguration January 2017 she was a distinguished scientist scholar she still is and her feeling was that the EPA is fundamentally a science-based agency and that rigorous science informs good environmental policy when she was in the room she was the smartest person in the room among the board of distinguished experts she met with the science advisory board regularly and she would come and spend an hour and a half which is really pretty amazing amount of time for someone with a plate as full as hers the next person I served under was Scott Pruett I never met mr. Pruett because he never came to meet with his science advisory board and is in his tenure as the administrator of the EPA he pursued an aggressive I would say anti science agenda and of course we know about some of the other challenges that he confronted in that role and so some of them are here and I don't need to talk about these but it really served to undermine the morale within the agency the EPA is an agency with some 18,000 employees nationwide many of whom are scientists and who have dedicated their lives to Environmental Protection and the health of the environment and so it was very disconcerting and there was a lot of people who were choosing to do other things rather than remain employed with an agency to which they devoted their whole careers so just one example of some of the things that were that were coming out of the EPA suddenly was was a refusal to understand the linkage between carbon dioxide and global warming I mean in the climate change debate you can argue about how fast things are happening to what extent it's it's human activity how we can adapt whether we should adapt your mitigate what it all means what's where do we put the resources to combat it but to just deny at the very basic the co2 increases and and greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to global warming is a pretty extreme view and then there was this statement how we've actually been on a hiatus since the 1980s which is what he said and this is the evidence I think it's pretty clear that there's no hiatus in the increase in temperature globally with with emissions so this kind of thing coming out of the leader of an agency that is responsible for responding to greenhouse gas emissions as was decided by the Supreme Court on three separate occasions was disconcerting and is this new science well-known spontaneous in 1896 published on this and recognized that increasing co2 increased the average temperature and could predict how much that would be and he's the one who identified this as the greenhouse effect and he thought by the way he thought this would be good for Sweden because it was too cold in Sweden but this is not new science and so to debate science that's been established for over a hundred and twenty-five years really speaks to a disdain for for science and scientists so EPA science advisory board was chartered under this law called Oda and it is to ensure that the as I said the EPA gets the best peer-reviewed science and all its decision-making and so the science advisory board deals with very very complex issues where EPA is trying to make policy they want to make sure they get the science right and so the science advisory board dealt with things under my watch connectivity of waters of the USA impacts of fracking on drinking water supplies chemical risk assessments for very important industrial chemicals carbon accounting for biofuels as we start to use agricultural residues and wood for as fuels to replace coal these are complex issues that have political ramifications they cost people money they save lives and so they're they're always difficult and you need the best science and the best independent science in order to advise the EPA and make sure they do the right thing this kind of advice was not valued under the the new administration under which I I served this is what the science advisory board looked like on the left before the inauguration the the members with no industry ties are shown in the blue those who have industry ties are shown in the pink and and then those with ties to fossil fuel chemical and tobacco industry are shown in the deep red so you can see with the first round of people finishing their terms on the science advisory board new people coming on there was a very dramatic shift in what the board looked like this had never happened before under any Republican or any Democratic administration since the founding of the EPA and the EPA science advisory board so there were some academics yeah these are many of them are academics still and this is this is published from here the citation whereas I made the one on the left because I knew every person who was who have served under my watch yeah yeah but the character of the board dramatically changed as you can readily see from this and so Gina McCarthy and responding to this when she was giving a talk at Harvard after no longer being the administrator encouraged scientists to become political scientists by their nature are sort of risk-averse introverted really don't want to go become advocates and so so she said that we really need to get into political fray because this these events have created have made our world become political and so as a public citizen who is well informed it's our duty to say something about this and try to act so a number of us took this to heart and four of the prior science advisory board chairs got together and did some things we wrote some some op eds we did some media appearances mostly to make the point that this a this is happening be it's not not the way to operate a science-based agency and see to try and put sunshine to this change that was occurring so along the way I was interviewed by Scott Simon on a Saturday morning that certainly took me out of my comfort zone and what was interesting is we're talking about pie shakes at the Hamburg Inn and then he says and three to one and then he asked me this riveting question that was a real zinger so I had to kind of be prepared for that so my comment and in response to one of his questions was shown here if mr. Pruit wants to form a regulated industry advisory board comprised to represent from the affected industries he can certainly do that but he shouldn't expect unbiased evaluation the science and policy implications from such a board and then I went Lee was interviewed by Ben Keefer on river to river and we talked about this because a number of the people in science advisory board we're finding out that they had been replaced when reporters called them and told them so rather than being told by by the agency or through the normal means that they had been replaced and their terms on the board had been terminated so then myself and and and Deb hammer one of the other former chairs of the science advisory board had not been in the register and we where we talked about what's a sake I mean what does what does this mean to the everyday person we tried to get on that that that you know attack and on the scientific integrity is not only disheartening but result in long lasting damages our society diminishing public health protections that we rely on and and denigrating the science that is critically important to this federal agency and then we went on to try and give some examples of what this means in terms of clean water clean air clean soil again this is something that I'm not trained for by you know I'm usually a lung guy who's in the lab studying an environmental lung disease rather than figuring out how to communicate these things effectively it's easier in the print media than it is on radio or television we've also been working with the new administrator we write our three-page letter we get back the two-sentence reply from the person three tiers down from from the the office the other thing that's been happening is to scrub any mention of climate or climate change from the EPA's website again this is an agency that's charged by Congress and with overseeing research and protections for climate change in the environment so to have no mention of that on their website seems to be rather extreme so before all that disappeared we downloaded virtually all of the content and as did a number of others so it's still available elsewhere but it should be on the EPA's website rather than having us have to host that material so so the status of environmental science in the u.s. I think special interests are winning now the government is not helping us uncover the truth but they're covering it with whatever that is that's being shoveled on top of it on the left and and I feel like we've really lost the special interest despite our best efforts to do otherwise and I hope that things can turn around and maybe even before two years from now but this is a serious issue and I think we need to as scientists be okay with stepping out of our comfort zones and taking on some of these big issues that are on the at the interface between our science and the politics of the day and with that stop and I guess I get a couple questions yeah it was this gonna Chris Martin from University of Northern Iowa is just gonna ask where would one find the EPA information that you copied from the site before they they took down the information on global warming eh SRC org and we just redid the website and and Jackie will be up tomorrow we just redid the website and I have not loaded the 52 fact sheets but there are we have them all yeah thanks yes my name is anna-marie I'm with the Des Moines Register so when you as a scientist become political and start being more open about your concerns are you at risk of losing funding at any point or not being accepted into certain grants like do you is that something you worry about so so I have never been supported by the EPA I've been supported by the National Institutes of Health which is a totally separate process a number of my colleagues who were demoted from various positions and who did have EPA funding did the same kind of things as me making statements in one case one of my colleagues decided to go a legal path and sued the EPA over her dismissal from the Advisory Board and there are certainly groups who are watching to see if there would be any retaliation and she has not yet tried to reapply for new funding so we don't know but it is of course a concern that many people would have if their principle research is funded through EPA and if their contract with their University requires that some other salary be paid by by federal dollars and research grants so in my case half of my salary must come from grants and contracts so so it's it's a it is a serious form of intimidation that can occur so I said yeah that's a good question yeah Emery the government's anti science attack represents a fair portion of the public who's also has that attitude I just wondered from a science point of view are you seeing that immunity to the facts so yeah that's an excellent question Emery I think one thing we've been seeing is it's it's kind of wrapped up with the fake news stories you know the whole notion that there's so much stuff out on the internet that's garbage or outright distortion and we talked about that in one of the courses I teach on climate change we actually look at stuff on the web that's completely fabricated there has been a NASA's logo on it or the IPCC's logo but it's really not and I think what encourages me is that many many school teachers librarians in particular our teaching young students and children to understand data sources sources of information what's reliable what is not reliable and I think in the process of that we might increase the science literacy and the value that people hold incredible science that's that's my hope but I think right now we're kind of at a low point in terms of the value that our society has for science I spend a fair amount of time in Europe and I think there's a different story there and perhaps that's tied to the aggressive nature of Europeans response to the climate change issue of the day and the response that those countries are mounting to try and mitigate and adapt I think we're going to move on but we'll have time for more questions later thank you so much thank you Peter that was a great talk and I sure do hope that you and other excellent scientists make their way back to the EPA board sooner than later and Emery to your concern about science and the public not wanting to not having appreciation for that I'm a medical doctor and I certainly see that there is an important intersect with health because I do feel that my patients the patients I see in clinic are very interested in science they're interested in their science and what's happening to their health and and I think you are most of you journalists that's great as I think I'm just putting in a plug for that that if you can connect with people about their health you may be able to get some interest there I'm going to talk about air pollution and in Iowa we don't necessarily think about air pollution as a number-one problem I just want to say that in the United States it has been a very big problem and that government regulatory agencies such as the EPA have had a really important impact on air pollution over the last since the seventies when the Clean Air Act was was envisioned and legislated in the early 70s we've had a remarkable improvement in air quality in United States and I a lot of us attribute that to our our government regulatory agencies I used to work in California I was in the Bay Area up until about a year ago and and my kid was in soccer and his coach now in his 60s was saying you know I played soccer in Los Angeles when I was a kid and I could hardly breathe I was wheezing so hard my eyes were watering and I said well did they call a practice they said no is like that every day and if you've been in LA recently things have really cleaned up and due to emissions controls and that have been mandated by EPA and the California Air Resou ces Board so a lot of good things coming out from those regulatory agencies my topic my focus is air pollution we don't have an overall global problem in the state of Iowa but we do have those pockets of problems and my patients are telling me about that I see I have an admin lung doctor and I see asthmatic patients in outpatient clinic and they're saying you know I live next to this factory on the Mississippi River and the missions are terrible I really need help what can I do and and so these are stories that we really need to listen to my focus as a lung Dockers also on infections of the lungs and and I'm going to talk about one infection called tuberculosis it's not a super huge problem in you in Iowa but it is globally a big problem I'm and I just want to give you a little bit of science behind what is tuberculosis it's caused by a small rod-shaped bacteria that people breathe into their lungs and here you see a sputum with Mycobacterium tuberculosis in this view de the little red rod-shaped organisms are at the Mycobacterium it's spread very easily through the cough the aerosol in the cough from person to person clinically and infects the lungs causing fever weight loss and cough ultimately can spread throughout the body it causes this wasting slow wasting disease that before antibiotics we call this consumption the tricky thing about TB is that people you don't necessarily notice symptoms right away so people can be infected cough cough and spread the infection so that's one of the reasons that it persists after millennia risk factors close contact poverty impaired immunity and in my research I'm looking at air pollution as a risk factor so worldwide there are a million 10 million cases of tuberculosis diagnosed annually and a million deaths secondary 2tb it's now the number one killer infectious disease killer worldwide even above HIV so still a big problem worldwide the incidents you can tell really varies from area to area so you have big problems in Southeast Asia over here in China India and in Africa so just one slide on air pollution the science behind air pollution type sources and global dis or distribution so that we can think about air pollution in some different ways and one of an easy way to categorize air pollution is by physical state gaseous or liquid or solid particle and the gases of course those on solid dioxide nitrogen dioxide and then the particles the particle I'm focusing on in my research is fine particulate matter of less than 2.5 microns in diameter so that's about the same size as a bacterium the reason that we're interested and a lot of researchers are so interested in fine particulate matter is that it's respirable deep into the lungs and from that alveolar space deep in the lungs it can be absorbed into the bloodstream so you have a pollution that is very bioavailable in the human and can cause organ damage throughout the main sources and my focus is on tuberculosis in Vietnam in Southeast Asia the main sources of pollution there are from vehicles and the first picture down there you see a crowded street in Hanoi the capital city of Vietnam and it's crowded with small motorcycles poor emissions that the the the stuff coming out of the small moped is worse than the emissions coming out of a large new vehicle in the United States and you have literally millions of these bikes on the roads every day the other big problem with emissions is coal burning coal burning for electricity even cooking inside the homes is happening with coal and also heating you can see the global distribution of particulate matter the red of course here is high levels of particulate matter the highest in the world here in India also in China and Vietnam is in Southeast Asia right down there so my research question okay so air pollution in Vietnam is very bad it's right up there with Beijing with Shanghai it doesn't get as much press tuberculosis is really bad in Vietnam as well so have some questions I said does is there an association between the two does air pollution increase the risk for tuberculosis ant as air pollution somehow impair the immune response against tuberculosis what is the mechanism there and so two studies hypotheses one fine particulate air pollution increases the risk for TB infection and secondly PM 2.5 impairs airway epithelial cell killing a bacteria I want to see if there's risk there and then see perhaps what mechanism might be driving that and so we have recently set up a study in Vietnam looking at that this is a large protest prospective cohort study of 350 healthy children each of those kids have been exposed in the house to somebody with TB and then we follow those kids prospectively over a one-year quarterly every three months getting in touch with a child measuring their air pollution exposures and testing them for tuberculosis here we have just a schematic but we're collecting air pollution on teflon filters and you have a scanning electron microscope picture here with a small particle of air pollution on the filter fabric then we get the particles off into solution and then we expose those particles to airway epithelial cells so those cells in the airway that can actually kill the TB rights and in there our hypothesis is that the particles are going to impede that killing our next steps after we enroll those children we're going to will perform the study procedures analyze the data and report the findings importantly I just wanted to say this in closing and you know this it's hard to do this research it's time-consuming and and I asked myself why am I doing this you know what's the reason and I think I think I have a good idea that there probably is an increased risk of this heavy air pollution with tuberculosis and I want to get that word out and and so if we do find that there is increased risk of air pollution with tuberculosis I think that's a message that really needs to be conveyed to to people in Vietnam and and you know people are eyes ask me so so you do this research you find something you know you find increased risk oh so what so what you know the government's not going to do anything but I think if people get this message and then put pressure on governments to make a change because tuberculosis said is is a really we don't feel it here but in Vietnam it's a scourge it's it's it's like killing people you tenth of people that get TB die from it and so every single family has TB in their family so that's if we if we get this across that air pollution is helping to drive that but they make I think we can see some change there in your slide about risk you had risk factors of close contact with someone with TB impaired immunity and poverty can you talk a little bit more about why poverty belongs in that list or whether yeah just yeah poverty poverty is a big risk factor for TB and I think I think one of the key features there is probably congregate living tuberculosis is directly its it it's the disease is the transmission is so important for that disease and it's been the ongoing challenge of trying to knock out the transmission and if you have a ton of people living in closed settings even in the household right if you have a lot of people in a small space with not a lot of windows then then you're gonna really increase your transmission we decrease transmission by windows because the UV light kills the bug as well as keeping the windows open will help ventilate the bacteria out and that's people in poverty you know little Hut's no windows yeah I think so that congregate poor living poor living conditions and then malnutrition is another really big one that from that suppresses the immune system to the body's ability to fight off the infection sure I had a couple questions about the one-year monitoring period that's arrived at that of the quarterly checks and then at the conclusion of this study this is the basis for a larger study right the so the one-year checks we found from prior literature that that kids that are exposed to somebody in the household with TB some of them do not go on to develop TB right away in fact it can take months months but within the first year after having a contact with somebody with TB most of the kids that are going to develop tuberculosis do so in that first year and then your other question was yes definitely so this is yeah this is a relatively small study it's going to be hard to make any definitive statements based on this so it's always it's kind of like a big pilot study it's more a little bit more than a pilot study but we'll definitely need to do some ongoing work yes what's up hey Zachary Smith press citizen I'm curious about how you guys go about sort of measuring the finding a child that has been exposed to one family member or more with TV like how does that how do you go about articulating that multiple exposure Majan like multiple exposure multiple people exposed could complicate that I mean how do you guys go about wrestling with that variable sounds the how do we identify those identification identification just it's either kind of hard thing today and so we operated we're operating on this study out of 8 district health centers in Hanoi so each of each of those district health centers is a TB clinic and so each of the TB doctors is recruiting and enrolling for us and so they each doctor identifies the index cases so patients with active tuberculosis and those patients are going into a treatment trial that somebody else is doing and then my my focus then is then so we have the patient then we also ask the patient oh do you have any kids at home and that's where we identify the kids yeah one last question hi Lana with the northwest Iowa review I'm curious your study subjects did did they have access to the BCG vaccine or is that not a bit was that not prevalent there yes everybody gets BCG and and the reason we do BCG and Vietnam and most highly endemic countries is that BCG does work in young children so it helps to prevent the severe manifestations of tuberculosis and zero to two year olds and so that's why we're still using it in those parts and we're actively working on a new vaccine that will help and in people older than that and the majority of the population it's complicating because BCG can give a false positive 'ti for our TB test which is essentially the skin test but that false positivity wanes over time great thank you so much Robert and I just wanted to point out that we will have these people here for lunch so you can ask them any questions during lunch so give them a hand okay so again my name is Darrin Thompson I'm a PhD fellow at the University of Iowa I'm a pedeu ologist so my interest in neonicotinoid insecticides is primarily as it relates to human exposure and the potential kind of long-term implications of being exposed to these insecticides over a short period of time or a long period of time until my research really kind of is digging into that so neonics are a relatively new insecticide compared to many of the other pesticides that are in use so historically speaking nicotine has been used as insecticide you know going back 2,000 years even in some societies today so I lived in the South Pacific and on their crops they'd grow tobacco they take the tobacco leaf they grind it up they use the extract as an insecticide the challenge with nicotine is it's not very stable in the sunlight so breakdown breaks down fairly readily but because of those insecticidal properties and considering where we've come from with some of the insecticides that have been used historically that had very pronounced health effects when being exposed to exposed to them the industry kind of came back to nicotine in the 80s and designed unic as a potential new insecticide that would be more stable in the environment but still be able to have kind of that benefit of protecting crops at when applied at low concentrations so 1994 the the first neo Nick there's about I think 12 to 13 different types of neo Nick Nick adenoids currently in use the first one called imidacloprid was introduced in 1994 and over the past couple of decades they've gone from being introduced to the two widely used class of insecticides in the world they're one of the reasons for their their increased popularity is that they're used not just and for agricultural purposes but they're used for an urban environment well they can be formulated and many different ways so in Iowa they're commonly used as seed treatments and so we have a picture of that here so essentially they're affixed to say a corn or soybean and then as the plant grows because they're highly water soluble that are absorbed by the plant and become part of the plant so where traditionally you take the insecticide and spray it when you take out the crop you can wash it off with the neo Nick especially the seed treatment you can't do it do that because it's become safe for a corn plant it's become part of the plan so it's in the kernel it also used flea and tick collars they're used to treat emerald ash borer used in many many different fashions because they are applied at such low concentrations and because of the way they are designed so they're designed with a on the structure of the neonicotinoid there's a negative charge and so the science behind that is that insects mammals humans we all have what we call nicotinic acetylcholine receptors there's variances depending on on the organism obviously and how how they're structured well that negative charge is believed in part kind of selectivity for insects so that there have a greater affinity to bind for those insect receptors than say mammals so in that way they're able to be applied at low concentrations with the hopes that they're gonna affect the target insect that's being focused on without having a negative burden on humans or other mammals that maybe baby exposed previous studies kind of globally have found that because they're so highly water soluble their make their way into surface water and groundwater quite readily so in Minnesota Wisconsin and from studies around the world they've been found in surface waters in wetlands groundwater it's only more recently that we've started to look at these in in Iowa and a few of the studies have been conducted they've found it in surface water they've found it in wetlands and within the past few years the EPA Health Canada and the European Union have started to look at possible health implications and there has been very limited research done in that area and that's kind of why I became interested in this topic so this is a these are compounds that are being applied everywhere we're coming in contact with them in our day-to-day environment what that means and how we may be exposed to it I really felt needed to be explored further so the way these insecticides work is essentially they bind to the nerve receptor they bind to it permanently so that the signal that is being transmitted continues to be transmitted and then ultimately the insect becomes paralyzed and diced what has been found in some studies is that these neonics may have negative effects on non-target species such as bees monarch butterflies even some animals such as birds that rely on insects so there's been studies in Europe where they've looked at declines and bird populations and they've attributed that to the insecticide killing off essentially their food supply some of the and animal studies they found that in neo necks especially in rats can cross the placenta blood-brain barrier and can alter the neuronal activity and rats and more so some of the decorative the more common Munich adenoids when they break down they lose that negative charge and become positively charged and some of those negatives are actually more toxic than the original parent compound in terms of human research so I I did a literature review looking at all of the data available and primarily anything that looked at kind of mammal exposure came from lab studies volcana rats goats and animals there wasn't much done in terms of kind of linking that to what this may mean for human health I think there was a study that where they also did a literature review and they found a essentially publications and that was published in 2017 for those looked at chronic exposure four of them looked at c te exposure and those acute exposures primarily were individuals who'd consumed a large amount of the insecticide with a and the intention of committing suicide before chronic exposures were really based upon essentially secondary data sources primarily from California so California has a very comprehensive pesticide database so knowing where pesticides are being applied in certain fields within the state and then looking at birth defects registry and kind of trying to correlate find associations between different cases and area and pesticides were being applied in those areas in three of those studies I think they found very weak associations with I think one was autism was with anencephaly which is essentially a birth defect that affects the development of the skull weak associations but again no no real discussion on how exposure may have occurred and at what levels so as an epidemiologist the dose of the exposure the magnitude of exposures is very important so just because you're able to statistically associate something whether it's there's actual plausible explanation for how someone may be exposed to that compound is very important to to figure out and so that's what I'm attempting to do so this is a map of imidacloprid which is the earliest Munich that was introduced but there's also one of the most common so just between 1994 and 2014 you can see that its uses has become quite ubiquitous there's a couple other compounds one called clonidine another one called tyoma Thaksin which are used most commonly in the seed treatments especially for corn and soybeans and those maps look very similar the difference meaning that those were introduced about a decade later so in early 2000s and if you look at many other pesticides that maps are very very similar in Iowa again really since 2003 2004 about the time that cloth Eon adenine thiamine toxin were introduced and the growth in use has has been pretty pretty exponential so right now we're approaching about 400,000 kilograms being applied a year and the scheme of things there's about 40 million million pounds of pesticides applied in Iowa alone 400 thousand kilograms is relatively small but given the newness it's still a pretty rapid increase so today I've been focusing primarily on exposure through drinking water and particularly well water so I've contacted two studies where the results haven't been published as of yet one we're starting to look at alluvial wells so vo wells are essentially typically shallow wells that have geology that means that there's a connection between surface water and well water so there's kind of a readily access for contaminants from the surface to make it into the well water and so I partnered with the US Geological Survey and we looked at 39 essentially monitoring wells in kind of North Eastern Iowa South Eastern Minnesota and what we found there is that in these monitoring wells 71% had at least one neonicotinoid that we were able to tech and about around 36% had at least two neonicotinoids and this sampling was done starting in July ending in November 2017 so typically the seeds are planted and April May and it's intended that these compounds break down within a few months but what we found is that even as late as November we are still finding essentially these compounds and well water so then going from that knowing that we could find them in shallow wells wanted to look at municipal wells different types of aquifers different types of well depths to see if this is something that can be found in kind of municipal well waters in general or is it specific to the shallow or well shallower wells that we were seeing earlier so in fall 2017 to summer 2018 I ran two sets of samples each with around 100 samples with swell depths ranging from 2,000 feet to under a hundred feet different types of aquifers so alluvial aquifers and other aquifers that are much much deeper and with that we were still finding in fall winter around 38% with at least one neonicotinoid and then later when we went back in the summer so a couple months after sampling trying to see if if there may be higher concentrations just after planting or is it pretty consistent we found 43% with at least one neo Nick and the concentrations that we are finding were very very low so typically when you think of like an EPA MCL you're thinking parts per million or milligrams per liter we were finding them in the nanograms per liter or parts per trillion so for instance if you were to think because these are kind of based upon nicotine you know the average cigarette has anywhere from between two to 20 milligrams and nicotine so you know there's a million nano grams in a milligram so if one liter of water has two nanograms of an EOTech the amount of water you need to consume to get an equivalent exposure to one cigarette is probably more than you'd want to drink you know in a lifetime but the fact that it's still there and from at least from preliminary indications is that concentrations remain fairly stable throughout the year you are being exposed to it and what that acute chronic exposure may mean over a lifetime so if you're cooking with it you're drinking with it you're showering with it those are things that that I'm hoping to kind of study further as as this progresses so I currently have two ongoing studies one is called the Northeast Iowa well water study and we started the funding started in July the sampling started in early December and so we're working with National Cancer Institute agricultural Health Study agricultural Health Study is a cohort study that has 60,000 Iowa farmers enrolled for the past 25 30 years and so we had visited 47 households where we collected water samples urine samples and then collected surveys on diet and farming practices and so based upon this we will look for a number of contaminants we'll look at the dietary history or look at the farming practices we'll test the urine the water and see if there's any correlation between various practices and potential exposure sampling for this has been completed and the laboratory analysis is is ongoing I'm hoping within the next year we'll begin to share some results of that another study is a study where I'm specifically looking at donors have the University of Iowa's maternal fetal tissue bank so this is essentially expecting mothers can opt into this program and they provide biological samples that would then be used for research purposes and so I've been provided access to urine samples for 350 women and I'm currently testing those samples for Anejo Nikita noids my intention kind of with these last two studies is the debate on the basis of what we find there we may be able to develop more long-term studies to really start to answer some of those questions about what exposure may mean in terms of longer term health effects kind of the conclusions overall is that you know the three most common eunuchs are frequently detected in groundwater they're found at concentrations under 10 nanograms per liter and especially in shallow unconfined wells so wells that aren't protected by bedrock and the exposure assessments ongoing and hopefully I'll have more information and becoming years on that this is just a list of the partners I've been working with on the various projects time for one question and then you guys can talk to them during lunch hi Nora Paul Grinnell College I'm not sure I know you're not all the way done with your research yet but do you have at least any ideas or maybe expectations on what you'll find in regards to who is most vulnerable to the effect the effects of these neonics at this point I'm kind of trying to go where the data leaves me trying to keep an open mind we're primarily looking at farmers right now and that was really just kind of logistics of it having access to agricultural health study in their long history of health information and the fact that they've partnered with some of the people I'm working with made it kind of an easy partnership but I think in terms of exposure there's been studies where they've looked at produce and they've found residues of these compounds and fruits and vegetables that you'd buy at the grocery store even as we were developing the method for identifying them in urine we've had some challenges in that the volunteers who have provided samples we were finding in it and so we had to determine you know is this potential lab contamination or is this really something that you know individuals who live in Iowa City and have nothing to do with farming are they really being exposed to it or is this completely something else that we're seeing on the machine that may not even be a negative neonicotinoid so I think it's likely that most of us are being exposed to them at very low levels because they're so ubiquitous but what that may means and who may be most vulnerable I think that the data that we discover will kind of dictate where we go our babies our fetuses just my opinion the European Union did identify again a couple of these pop compounds is potentially neurotoxic but again that was based upon animal studies and oftentimes the translation from what happens with animal in the lab to what it means for human health is is very difficult and it may mean nothing just because you see a neuro development issue in a rat doesn't mean that it's gonna necessarily translate to a human but kind of personally that was what drew me to this so seeing that and then what does this mean for a developing child that's something I'd like to explore and so that's kind of why I started it but I've not seen any peer-reviewed published data to really give me a strong indication that that is occurring but then again there I mean just in terms of biomonitoring studies there's been a couple in China there's been a couple in Japan and there's more recently a study it was published here in the US but up until a few months ago I'm not aware of anybody other than my group of researchers who is looking at in the United States so there's just so little information available to really say anything definitive