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National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

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Your Environment. Your Health.

Final Progress Reports: Columbia University: Community Engagement Core

Superfund Research Program

Community Engagement Core

Project Leader: Yan Zheng
Co-Investigator: Sara V. Flanagan (Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University)
Grant Number: P42ES010349
Funding Period: 2012-2021

Project-Specific Links

Final Progress Reports

Year:   2020  2016 

The Community Engagement Core (CEC) and Research Translation Core (RTC) began a joint collaboration with the New Jersey Departments of Health and Environmental Protection as an academic partner on their 5-year Centers for Disease Control (CDC) grant to expand work on private well water quality issues in New Jersey. This grant supports new efforts to perform outreach and testing of private wells, development of new methods to increase well testing and treatment, new educational/informational materials highlighting the importance of testing/treatment/maintenance behaviors, and guidance for local health departments to improve services for private well owners.

A pamphlet and poster targeting households with pregnant women and small children using private well water, to be used during planned 2017 clinic-based testing interventions were developed in 2016. Also, a targeted mailing released public health notices offering testing to 2000 addresses in close proximity to a private well with known elevated arsenic levels. A mailed survey to homes with private wells exceeding the NJ arsenic standard according to Private Well Testing Act records is also in progress.

Analysis of survey responses will identify the psychological, situational, and sociodemographic factors associated with arsenic mitigation and the barriers to protective action faced by this population. Findings will inform development of guidance materials for private well owners managing arsenic contamination and for local health departments to support them in this process. In 2016 CEC and RTC researchers and government co-authors also published a series of 3 papers on arsenic in private well water in Science of the Total Environment, based on their surveys of private well owners in two states.

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