For the past two summers, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania has been digging into old records and conducting interviews of former and present residents of Ambler, Pennsylvania, a town about 20 miles from Philadelphia, hoping to better understand the health risks associated with environmental exposure to asbestos.
According to a recent article in Penn News, senior Shabnam Elahi began the Ambler project when she was accepted to the Penn Undergraduate Environmental Health Scholars Program, intrigued by the legacy that asbestos production left behind in this suburban town, where rates of malignant mesothelioma are higher than average.
Elahi is following in the footsteps of Professor Edward Emmett, director of academic programs in occupational and environmental medicine at Penn Med, who began investigating the town’s asbestos problems about six years ago. She sees the professor’s research as a great jumping off point for her continued investigations.
Ambler, Pennsylvania became a factory town in 1881 when a plant specializing in products that contained asbestos became part of the landscape of the then-rural town. The factory was shut down in the 1970s when federal regulations governing asbestos use were enacted, but waste from the factory has remained and the EPA has declared the spot where the former BoRit plant once sat and dumped its waste to be a federal Superfund site. That means the government is now in charge of cleaning up the toxic areas in Ambler.
Now, residents are clearly seeing the effects of asbestos exposure as more and more cases of mesothelioma appear. As the disease has a long latency period and is often not diagnosed until decades after exposure occurs, it is expected that cases of the disease will continue to surface in the years to come. The most cases have appeared in West and South Ambler, closest to the site. Those are the neighborhoods that will be the focus of Elahi’s research.
“Ultimately, I want to map out the mesothelioma rates,” she says, “which areas of the neighborhoods have higher concentrations of cancer, the ones closer to the factory or the ones closer to the sites? Were factory workers the most sick because they were constantly exposed? Or was it the wives or the children?”
Overall, Elahi notes, she hopes to determine which factors lead to the highest risk of exposure and consequential health issues, and also plans to focus on individual and communal perceptions of asbestos exposure.