Characterizing environmental health inequalities with spatial environmental database, exposure model and biomonitoring measures

Environmental health inequalities have become a major preoccupation for public health as evidenced by the emergence of the French national plans for health and environment. The third plan (2015-2019) has highlighted that the development of a methodology to derive indicators for identifying and characterizing environmental health inequalities is a priority. At a regional scale, environmental monitoring networks are not sufficient to capture the multidimensionality of the exposure at finer resolution. In order to increase representativeness, exposure composite indicators could be built using additional available databases and statistical modeling. To tackle these objectives, the proposed methodology is to combine contaminant source and environmental concentration databases, exposure model and population biological impregnation measurements with a spatial approach. To elicit the proposed methodology we will consider a pesticide case study developed in the context of the MecoExpo study conducted in Picardy (France). Notably in this framework, topsoil concentrations are estimated using a spatial interpolation, method able to integrate topsoil concentration and pesticide deposit data. For water, concentrations are temporally interpolated with methodology that allows us to overcome the problem of under the detection limit concentrations. Then, an exposure multimedia model developed by INERIS is employed to estimate exposure dose in comparison with biological impregnations of cohort participants (neonatal meconium assays - 700 participants). Analysis’ outputs enable to build cumulative exposure indicator, identify pollutant sources and determinants of exposure and vulnerable populations. As a perspective, spatial relationships of exposure indicators, biological impregnation and health data will be estimated to identify potential factors influencing variability in disease spatial pattern in the French coordinated integrated environment and health inequality platform project