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CHE Partner Molly Jacobs, MPH: Running Toward a Sustainable Tomorrow
Program Manager
Lowell Center for Sustainable Production, University of Massachusetts--Lowell
www.sustainableproduction.org
As told to Shelby Gonzalez, CHE Administrative Coordinator
When I was in second grade, we did a project where we were asked the question "If you found a money tree, what would you do?" My answer, in big block letters: "I would give it to the government so they could help people."
The theme of helping people came up again in a conversation with my father after a high school trip to Washington, D.C. I was completely moved by the passion and energy of those working in the public’s interest. I told him that I wanted to do the same and work on environmental issues.
My passionate interest in the environment wasn’t always there. At one point I was a really annoying teenager who wanted nothing to do with the outdoors; I preferred being at the mall with friends.
Then, when I was a junior in high school, I took an unusual field biology class. The class took field trips all over California. Your grade was dependent upon spending a number of hours in the field after school and on the weekends. I remember camping on the coast and learning about tidal marine ecosystems, walking among oak groves outside Livermore while learning about the network of animals and plants supported within the umbrella of an oak tree, and smelling Jeffrey Pines (which smell like vanilla) while on a camping and cross-country skiing trip in the Sierras.
All these experiences left an impression on me. I became in awe of the natural world and also deeply disturbed about the threats to these amazing places and their species - threats that also have direct links to human health and wellbeing. To my parents' thrill, I found there was more to life than the mall (Today you'd be hard-pressed to ever find me in a mall).
I went on to pursue biology and environmental studies at the University of California - Santa Cruz. During my senior year and several years afterward, I worked in an environmental toxicology lab studying the health of marine ecosystems. We monitored levels of persistent organochlorine chemicals -- DDT, dieldrin, chlordane, PCBs, etc -- in marine life.
I loved the work and using science to investigate questions raised. But I grew concerned for my own health as the solvents we worked with in large volumes were anything but health-enhancing. I found it ironic that to study the harms we do to the environment, we create more harm.
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Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one in the lab seeing the irony. We started some methods development work to identify safer alternatives to the chemicals we used in our studies. I found myself becoming more passionate about understanding and identifying strategies to prevent disease and disability from environmental pollution and occupational factors.
After graduate school at the Boston University School of Public Health, I worked for a few years at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health conducting disease cluster studies. I loved directly working with the affected communities, incorporating their knowledge into the design and conduct of epidemiologic investigations. Yet I became frustrated by the limitations of epidemiology to help citizens answer, “Was it our contaminated drinking water that caused the excess of cancer in our community?”.
Studies can take years to complete and the resulting conclusions are rarely definitive because of inherent limitations in the science. Analytic epidemiologic studies (case-control/cohort studies) are launched only when there are toxic exposure sources in a community that been shown to be risk factors for the disease under investigation.
I wanted to work more on the preventative level. If we know these agents are linked with specific diseases, and sources of these agents exist in communities, then let’s spend more resources working with businesses, health centers, municipal officials and concerned citizens to identify solutions that mitigate these known risk factors and prevent future cases of disease.
That's basically what I do as Program Manager at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. The goal of my work is twofold: to raise awareness about environmental and occupational factors that contribute to causing chronic diseases, and to promote prevention strategies associated with such risks.
I juggle up to half a dozen projects at a time. Day to day, this means I do a lot of different things: crunch numbers, prepare talks, drink coffee, submit abstracts to meetings, write for reports, analyze data, respond to the media, and participate in conference calls. Lately I spend a lot of time working on a project called Toward Tomorrow, convening a number of organizations across the environmental and public health spectrum to identify and develop a common agenda.
I am fortunate to work with Dick Clapp and Polly Hoppin, two tremendous human beings and valued experts on the topics of cancer (Dick) and asthma (Polly). My work with them often involves evaluating hazard and health outcome data and reviewing the peer-reviewed scientific literature to synthesize what we know about occupational and environmental causes of these two diseases. We use this information to bring together citizen groups, workers, businesses, medical institutions, and governments in order to encourage the development of programs and policies that mitigate modifiable risk factors.
The intention of the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production is not to prioritize environmental and occupational risks above other types of disease risk factors, but simply to get them on organizations’ disease prevention agendas. The last time I saw my physician she asked me about my diet and exercise routine, as she usually does. She has never asked me if I’m exposed to hazardous agents at my job.
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Outside of work, I love to run. There's this spot about a ten-minute drive from my house with trails that loop around a reservoir. It's this great little oasis outside the city.
Runners inspire me. I just got to see the Boston Marathon. I watched the runners go by for hours with a smile glued to my face and a random tear falling here and there as I witnessed the most amazing "marathon moments" of kindness, community and triumph.
Something else that has inspired me recently is the efforts of many CHE Partners on bisphenol-A. When I read that the American Cancer Society called it "prudent" to reduce exposure to BPA, and that major retailers are phasing out bottles that contain it, I wanted to declare it a holiday.
Victories aside, though, there are still major challenges facing the environmental health movement. “There’s no profit in prevention.” John Bailar said this years ago regarding the cancer epidemic and it still holds true today. We have an entire economy dependent on treating illness.
Now, we need and always will need effective medical treatments. Those of us fighting chronic illnesses are very thankful for medical breakthroughs. But we can’t continue to be shocked by the rising incidence of many chronic diseases when resources spent on prevention are only a blip on the radar screen compared to what we spend researching treatments and the ever-elusive “cure”.
The importance of prevention becomes even more obvious when you consider the animal experiments with radiation and EDCs that are showing “epigenetic trans-generational alterations”, alterations that result in tumor development and other disease states in adulthood not just in the animal exposed, but also in the animal’s offspring and all subsequent generations examined. [i] So science is starting to show that some toxic agents not only affect our unborn offspring, it affects their unborn offspring as well.
That’s why the work of CHE Partners and others is so critical. CHE is an amazing forum for all of us to engage and learn from each other’s work.
[i] Anway MD, Leathers C, Skinner MK. Endocrine disruptor vinclozolin induced epigenetic transgenerational adult-onset disease, Endocrinology. 2006;147(12):5515-5523.
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