From Dirty Buildings, Dirty Bombs to Cleaner Citizens
For David Tollerud, it’s not a far stretch from dirty buildings to dirty bombs.
Which is why the expert in workplace hazards recently was tapped to assess the nation’s need for publicly distributed radiation antidotes in case of nuclear accident or terrorist-led nuclear attacks.
Tollerud is chair of the University of Louisville’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, a new academic unit in the School of Public Health and Information Sciences.
David Tollerud (left) has a knack for collaboration when it comes to tackling public health issues. One collaborator is Adewale Troutman, right, a U of L associate professor in public health and information sciences and director of the Louisville Metro Health Department.
His basic tenet is that people’s jobs shouldn’t make them sick.
“We spend most of our waking hours at work so it’s a good place to deal with a lot of health and safety problems,” he says.
Tollerud has studied the risk of lead exposure for glass industry workers. In another project, he examined ways to reduce on-the-job motor vehicle accidents among city police and firefighters. He has analyzed the usefulness of back belts in preventing workplace injuries, looked at ways to protect health-care workers from tuberculosis and studied the immune systems of chemical workers with bronchitis.
Those experiences prepared him to chair a National Research Council committee examining the best way to stockpile and distribute potassium iodide nationwide for use as a countermeasure in a radiation incident. It was formed under a new federal law calling for improved U.S. bioterrorism preparedness and response procedures.
Potassium iodide, a form of iodine, limits radiation injury and cancer risk to the thyroid gland if taken within a few hours of exposure. Tollerud’s panel was asked to examine the logistics of getting the antidote into place for quick and effective use in the event of a “dirty bomb” explosion, damage to a nuclear power plant or other large-scale radiation disaster. A dirty bomb is a relatively crude device that uses conventional explosives such as dynamite to disperse radiation.
In such cases, potassium iodide should be made available to everyone who might face a significant health risk, particularly infants, children and pregnant and lactating women, the committee found.
“We recommended that while the federal government should maintain stockpiles of potassium iodide and a distribution system, state and local authorities should decide how to implement and structure a distribution program in their area,” Tollerud said at the time of the findings.
“We also said the distribution plans should include a carefully developed and tested public education program.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control is studying the panel’s recommendations to work out logistics in tandem with federal, state and local agencies.
“My research philosophy is to partner with an organization that wants to solve an actual problem and then get it done,” he says.
Tollerud’s “real world” approach has landed him on many high-level panels dealing with some of the nation’s most serious public health questions.
For instance, he served on several Institute of Medicine committees gauging the effects of the herbicide Agent Orange on Vietnam veterans.
Tollerud was first drawn to environmental health in the early 1980s while serving as a medical staff Fellow at the National Cancer Institute in Washington.
“It was 1982, and we were studying a new disease called AIDS. We were looking for environmental causes of the HIV virus,” he recalls. “I realized then that I wanted to investigate the environmental factors involved in health. I found it fascinating then, and I still do.”
Tollerud will teach again in fall 2005 when U of L’s first class of environmental and occupational health students is slated to enroll. For now he is developing coursework and devoting attention to several major research projects.
In a $3.5 million, five-year study funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, he is investigating the health risks that enriched uranium may have posed for workers over the years at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in southwestern Kentucky. U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell was instrumental in obtaining financial support for the study.
To assess exposure levels, investigators are compiling data on the thousands of employees who worked at the plant for at least 30 days since its opening in 1952, Tollerud says.
Tollerud also has joined the West Louisville Partnership for Environmental Justice, a long-term project involving U of L, the Louisville Metro Health Department and neighborhood citizens. The partnership addresses environmental health issues in the Rubbertown area where residents have a high rate of health problems.
The affected neighborhoods, home to some 90,000 people, are next to chemical and other manufacturing plants that emit about 5 million pounds of air toxins yearly, according to recent statistics.
“We’re investigating the relationship between environmental exposure to certain pollutants and specific childhood health problems such as neurocognitive development and asthma,” Tollerud says.
The partnership has applied to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences for funds to carry out the West Louisville study.
Tollerud also hopes to receive approval from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute for a five-year, $4 million study of workplace interventions aimed at reducing obesity. Kent Adams, associate professor in U of L’s College of Education and Human Development, is joining him as co-principal investigator on that project.
“In March (U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services) Tommy Thompson named obesity as one of America’s top health problems,” Tollerud says. “We’ll come up with strategies that can be adopted in the workplace to fight obesity, such as putting healthier food and drinks in vending machines and encouraging exercise.”
Tollerud says teamwork is the key to managing so many research projects.
“These projects all involve collaboration by people in different academic disciplines, in the health department, in the private sector and more. I seem to be able to bring people of very different interests and backgrounds together and move them toward a common goal.”
