Spotlight On: The Intersection of Health and the Environment

Changes to our environment and environmental contamination from natural and human sources can have an enormous impact, particularly on vulnerable populations such as children, women, and older adults. Environmental epidemiology is a critical tool in preventing and responding to a multitude of resulting health challenges. Abt Global is at the forefront of this interdisciplinary health research and program work. We assemble nimble teams that can quickly stand up large, complex, research studies to address difficult challenges, coordinating across multiple sites, labs, and in the field.

Our cross-functional experts work across public health and the environment domestically and around the world to help clients and communities understand the issues and responses at every level, from the molecular to individuals and populations and to entire ecosystems. We draw from our in-house expertise of epidemiologists, environmental scientists, data scientists, and research managers. We also forge strategic partnerships with university, private, federal, and state laboratories, state health departments, and community stakeholders.

In exploring these areas, our teams provide a broad spectrum of services: research, monitoring, and evaluation; data capture and survey; communication and behavior change; and digital transformation. Our extensive experience responding to environmental health issues enables us to launch large surveillance data collection platforms to inform decision-making.

Find out how we can help mobilize teams and partners for your environmental health needs at any scale, from laboratory, field-based, and cohort research to community engagement and communications response planning.

Capabilities

Abt has more than 50 years of experience supporting national, regional, and local environmental and public health projects across the U.S. and around the world. From COVID-19 studies for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to PFAS analyses for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to an oil spill response for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we advance the latest methodologies and generate high-quality evidence. Our expertise includes:

Epidemiology
Participant recruitment, retention, and communication
Community engagement
Innovative sampling designs to integrate complex, environmental-level data with human health endpoints
Laboratory coordination
Study coordinating centers
Pharmakinetic modeling

Relevant Experience

PFAS, Environmental Contamination, and Health
Client: ATSDR

Concern about “forever chemicals” is mainstream news now. Long before that happened, our multidisciplinary teams of health professionals, environmental scientists, data scientists, and communicators designed and implemented studies examining the associations between per-and polyfluoralkyl substances (PFAS) and human outcomes. Abt is currently coordinating data analysis, data management, and laboratory-related activities for sites across the country. In addition to the study design and implementation, our teams have created innovative data management and statistical tools to reconstruct historical exposures from drinking water and pharmakinetic data, enabling concerned citizens to estimate their own blood PFAS levels.

Investigating Complex Toxicological Effects
Client: Multiple State and Federal Agencies

The ability to accurately measure toxicological exposures is an essential and challenging component of environmental health research. Our toxicologists design, implement, conduct, and manage a wide range of laboratory and field-based bioassays, investigations, and other tests to fill key data gaps and develop biomarkers of exposure. Working across sectors, we use our in-house expertise and strategic collaborations and partnerships with university, private, federal, and state laboratories while applying state-of-the-art toxicity metrics. We offer a holistic approach to assessing toxicity that includes a range of endpoints, including standard, molecular, physiological, and health metrics.

Effects from Exposure to Aerosolized Cyanobacterial Toxins
Client: CDC National Center for Environmental Health

Toxic algal blooms are becoming increasingly problematic, but the health effects of toxin exposure, particularly from airborne toxins, are not well known. Using a multidisciplinary team of health scientists, ecologists, and clinical staff, Abt conducted a cross-section, field-based epidemiology study to assess the exposure and potential health impacts of blue-green algal blooms, including recruitment, air monitoring, water sampling, biological specimen collection, and participant surveys.

Urgent Response and Real-time Surveillance of COVID-19

Demonstrated Success Addressing Emerging Public Health Challenges
Client: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

In addition to past relevant experience conducting environmental health studies, Abt’s implementation of the COVID-19 Cohort Studies demonstrates our success in data and specimen collection coordination, and participant recruitment and retention. Early in the pandemic, CDC urgently required data to inform the COVID-19 response, especially related to risk and protective factors across vulnerable groups. Our services and expertise enabled us to respond rapidly by adapting existing infrastructures, study protocols, and tools to collect data and human specimens, conduct surveillance to assess risk, and characterize COVID-19’s disease epidemiology. We partnered with clinical institutions chosen for their history of respiratory virus research. Abt created and maintained over 50 Tableau dashboards to display completion rates of key study activities, demographics of study participants, progress in study recruitment, and overall results for multiple stakeholders. Across all studies, Abt collaborated on development of nine protocols with a total of 220 appendices, recruited and collected survey data from more than 9,500 participants, and collected over 440,000 respiratory and over 95,000 serology specimens. Abt also extracted EMR data for over 40,000 hospitalized patients for secondary data analyses. By the end of the contract, Abt had submitted 49 analysis-ready datasets with thousands of variables including derived variables and documentation, 68 standard operating procedures, and more than 45 other study-specific documents. The studies informed public health guidance on masking, vaccines, and where to target specific messaging for high-risk groups, and findings have been published in over 35 journal articles.