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Background: To make informed decisions about endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), people need functional understanding of exposures and health and an ability to act on their knowledge. The return of biomonitoring results is an opportunity to educate people about EDCs and motivate exposure reduction., Objectives: This study investigates environmental health knowledge about EDCs, concerns about health effects, and exposure-reducing behaviors before and after the return of individual-level exposure results or only study-wide results., Methods: Women in the Child Health and Development Studies who were biomonitored for 42 EDCs were randomly assigned to receive a report with personal chemical results or only study-wide findings. We interviewed participants before and after report-back about their knowledge and concerns about EDCs and how frequently they performed exposure-related behaviors. We investigated baseline differences by education and race and examined changes after report-back by race and report type., Results: Participants ( n = 135 ) demonstrated general understanding of exposure pathways and health impacts of EDCs. For 9 out of 20 knowledge questions, more than 90% of participants ( n ≥ 124 ) gave correct responses at baseline, including for questions about chemicals' persistence in the body and effects of early-life exposure. Most participants held two misconceptions-about chemical safety testing in the United States and what doctors can infer from EDC results-although errors decreased after report-back. Initially, concern was higher for legacy pollutants, but report-back increased concern for consumer product chemicals. After report-back, participants took some actions to reduce exposures, particularly to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and total behavior was associated with knowledge and concern but not race, education, or report type., Discussion: This study demonstrated that participants had foundational knowledge about EDCs and that report-back further built their environmental health literacy. We conclude that future communications should target misconceptions about chemicals regulation in the United States, because information about regulations is crucial for people to evaluate risks posed by consumer product chemicals and decide whether to engage with public policy. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP12565.

Background: The PROTECT Center is a multi-project initiative that studies the relationship between exposure to environmental contaminants and preterm births during the prenatal and postnatal period among women living in Puerto Rico. PROTECT's Community Engagement Core and Research Translation Coordinator (CEC/RTC) play a key role in building trust and capacity by approaching the cohort as an engaged community that provides feedback about processes, including how personalized results of their exposure to chemicals should be reported back. The goal of the Mi PROTECT platform was to create a mobile-based application of DERBI (Digital Exposure Report-Back Interface) for our cohort that provides tailored, culturally appropriate information about individual contaminant exposures as well as education on chemical substances and approaches to exposure reduction., Methods: Participants (N = 61) were presented with commonly used terms in environmental health research related to collected samples and biomarkers, followed by a guided training on accessing and exploring the Mi PROTECT platform. Participants evaluated the guided training and Mi PROTECT platform answering a Likert scale in separated surveys that included 13 and 8 questions, respectively., Results: Participants provided overwhelmingly positive feedback on the clarity and fluency of presenters in the report-back training. Most participants reported that the mobile phone platform was both accessible and easy to navigate (83% and 80%, respectively) and that images included in the platform facilitated comprehension of the information. Overall, most participants (83%) reported that language, images, and examples in Mi PROTECT strongly represented them as Puerto Ricans., Conclusions: Findings from the Mi PROTECT pilot test informed investigators, community partners and stakeholders by demonstrating a new way to promote stakeholder participation and foster the "research right-to-know.", Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Cardona Cordero et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Participants in biomonitoring studies who receive personal exposure reports seek information to reduce exposures. Many chemical exposures are driven by systems-level policies rather than individual actions; therefore, change requires engagement in collective action. Participants' perceptions of collective action and use of report-back to support engagement remain unclear. We conducted virtual focus groups during summer 2020 in a diverse group of peripartum people from cohorts in the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program (N = 18). We assessed baseline exposure and collective action experience, and report-back preferences. Participants were motivated to protect the health of their families and communities despite significant time and cognitive burdens. They requested time-conscious tactics and accessible information to enable action to reduce individual and collective exposures. Participant input informed the design of digital report-back in the cohorts. This study highlights opportunities to shift responsibility from individuals to policymakers to reduce chemical exposures at the systems level., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Study participants want to receive their biomonitoring results for environmental chemicals, and ethics guidelines encourage reporting back. However, few studies have quantitively assessed participants' responses to individual exposure reports, and digital methods have not been evaluated., Objectives: We isolated effects of receiving personal results vs. only study-wide findings and investigated whether effects differed for Black participants., Methods: We randomly assigned a subset of 295 women from the Child Health and Development Studies, half of whom were Black, to receive a report with personal environmental chemical results or only study-wide (aggregate) findings. Reports included results for 42 chemicals and lipids and were prepared using the Digital Exposure Report-Back Interface (DERBI). Women were interviewed before and after viewing their report. We analyzed differences in website activity, emotional responses, and intentions to participate in future research by report type and race using Wilcoxon rank sum tests, Wilcoxon-Pratt signed ranks tests, and multiple regression., Results: The personal report group spent approximately twice as much time on their reports as the aggregate group before the post-report-back interview. Among personal-report participants ( n = 93 ), 84% (78) viewed chemical group information for at least one personal result highlighted on their home page; among aggregate-report participants ( n = 94 ), 66% (62) viewed any chemical group page. Both groups reported strong positive feelings (curious, informed, interested, respected) about receiving results before and after report-back and mild negative feelings (helpless, scared, worried). Although most participants remained unworried after report-back, worry increased by a small amount in both groups. Among Black participants, higher post report-back worry was associated with having high levels of chemicals., Conclusions: Participants were motivated by their personal results to access online information about chemical sources and potential health effects. Report-back was associated with a small increase in worry, which could motivate appropriate action. Personal report-back increased engagement with exposure reports among Black participants. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP9072.

Little is known about the willingness of prospective study participants to share environmental health data. To fill this gap, we conducted a hypothetical vignette survey among 1,575 women who have volunteered to be contacted about breast cancer studies. Eighty-three percent were interested in participating in the environmental studies, with little difference whether data were restricted to the research team, shared with approved researchers, or publicly accessible. However, participants somewhat preferred controlled access for children's data. Respondents were more interested in studies with environmental rather than biological samples and more interested when researchers would return personal results, a practice of increasing importance. They were more reluctant to share location or to participate if studies involved electronic medical records. Many expressed concerns about privacy, particularly security breaches, but reidentification risks were mentioned infrequently, indicating that this topic should be discussed during informed consent.

Nearly all Americans have detectable concentrations of endocrine disrupting chemicals from consumer products in their bodies, and expert panels recommend reducing exposures. To inform exposure reduction, we investigated whether consumers who are trying to avoid certain chemicals in consumer products have lower exposures than those who are not. We also aimed to make exposure biomonitoring more widely available. We enrolled 726 participants in a crowdsourced biomonitoring study. We targeted phenolic compounds-specifically parabens, bisphenol A (BPA) and analogs bisphenol F (BPF) and bisphenol S (BPS), the UV filter benzophenone-3, the anti-microbial triclosan, 2,4-dichlorophenol, and 2,5-dichlorophenol-and collected survey data on consumer products, cleaning habits, and efforts to avoid related chemicals. We investigated associations between 68 self-reported exposure behaviors and urine concentrations of ten chemicals, and evaluated whether associations were modified by intention to avoid exposures. A large majority (87%) of participants reported taking steps to limit exposure to specific chemicals, and, overall, participants achieved lower concentrations than the general U.S. population for parabens, BPA, triclosan, and benzophenone-3 but not BPF and BPS. Participants who reported avoiding all four ingredient groups-parabens, triclosan, bisphenols, and fragrances-were twice as likely as others to be in the lowest quartile of cumulative exposure. Avoiding certain products and reading ingredient labels to avoid chemicals was most effective for parabens, triclosan, and benzophenone-3. Avoiding BPA was not effective for reducing bisphenol exposures. Avoiding certain chemicals in products was generally associated with reduced exposure for chemicals listed on labels. Greater ingredient transparency will help consumers who read labels to reduce their exposure to a wider range of potentially harmful chemicals. In order to more equitably address public health, labeling policies should be complemented by regulations that exclude harmful chemicals from consumer products., (Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier GmbH.. All rights reserved.)

Background: Sharing research data uses resources effectively; enables large, diverse data sets; and supports rigor and reproducibility. However, sharing such data increases privacy risks for participants who may be re-identified by linking study data to outside data sets. These risks have been investigated for genetic and medical records but rarely for environmental data., Objectives: We evaluated how data in environmental health (EH) studies may be vulnerable to linkage and we investigated, in a case study, whether environmental measurements could contribute to inferring latent categories (e.g., geographic location), which increases privacy risks., Methods: We identified 12 prominent EH studies, reviewed the data types collected, and evaluated the availability of outside data sets that overlap with study data. With data from the Household Exposure Study in California and Massachusetts and the Green Housing Study in Boston, Massachusetts, and Cincinnati, Ohio, we used k -means clustering and principal component analysis to investigate whether participants' region of residence could be inferred from measurements of chemicals in household air and dust., Results: All 12 studies included at least two of five data types that overlap with outside data sets: geographic location (9 studies), medical data (9 studies), occupation (10 studies), housing characteristics (10 studies), and genetic data (7 studies). In our cluster analysis, participants' region of residence could be inferred with 80%-98% accuracy using environmental measurements with original laboratory reporting limits., Discussion: EH studies frequently include data that are vulnerable to linkage with voter lists, tax and real estate data, professional licensing lists, and ancestry websites, and exposure measurements may be used to identify subgroup membership, increasing likelihood of linkage. Thus, unsupervised sharing of EH research data potentially raises substantial privacy risks. Empirical research can help characterize risks and evaluate technical solutions. Our findings reinforce the need for legal and policy protections to shield participants from potential harms of re-identification from data sharing. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP4817.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) are used in a wide range of consumer products for their water- and grease-resistant properties, but few studies have explored this exposure route. We used multiple regression to investigate associations between six self-reported behaviors hypothesized to influence PFAS exposure and serum concentrations of six PFAS chemicals in 178 middle-aged women enrolled in the Child Health and Development Studies, about half of whom are African American. Blood samples were collected in 2010-2013, and participants were interviewed about behavior in 2015-2016. Results showed that African American women had lower levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS) compared with non-Hispanic white women. In African Americans, but not others, frequent consumption of prepared food in coated cardboard containers was associated with higher levels of four PFASs. Flossing with Oral-B Glide, having stain-resistant carpet or furniture, and living in a city served by a PFAS-contaminated water supply were also associated with higher levels of some PFASs. Product testing using particle-induced γ-ray emission (PIGE) spectroscopy confirmed that Oral-B Glide and competitor flosses contained detectable fluorine. Despite the delay between blood collection and interview, these results strengthen the evidence for exposure to PFASs from food packaging and implicate exposure from polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)-based dental floss for the first time.

Competing Interests: The authors declare they have no actual or potential competing financial interests.

Researchers are increasingly asked to share research data as part of publication and funding processes and to maximize the benefits of publicly funded research. The Safe Harbor provision of the U.S. Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) offers guidance to researchers by prescribing how to redact data for public sharing. For example, the provision requires removing explicit identifiers (such as name, address and other personally identifiable information), reporting dates in years, and reducing some or all digits of a postal (or ZIP) code. Is this sufficient? Can research participants still be re-identified in research data that adhere to the HIPAA Safe Harbor standard? In 2006, researchers collected air and dust samples and interviewed residents of 50 homes from Bolinas and Richmond (Atchison Village and Liberty Village), California, to analyze the residents' exposure to pollutants. The study, known as the Northern California Household Exposure Study [1], led to publications that have been cited hundreds of times. We conducted experiments with separate "attacker" and "scorer" teams to see whether we could identify study participants from two versions of the data redacted beyond the HIPAA standard, one in which all dates were reported in ranges of 10 or 20 years and another in which a study participant's birth year was reported exactly. The attackers were blinded to the names and addresses of the participants, and the scorers were blinded to the strategy.

Invasive species can impose novel selection pressures on natives, such as toxins to which native taxa are not adapted. Native species may survive such invasions by evolving mechanisms to avoid toxin exposure or increase toxin tolerance. Red imported fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) employ an alkaloid-based venom to defend their colonies and capture prey. In this study we aim to characterize the sublethal effects of invasive fire ant venom on a native vertebrate, the eastern fence lizard (Sceloporus undulatus), and to determine whether lizard populations that have been exposed to these fire ants for approximately 35 generations have increased physiological resistance to the venom. We documented the sublethal impact of fire ant venom on fence lizard performance by naturally exposing lizards to fire ant stings and recording changes in three fitness-relevant measures: bite force, righting ability, and sprint speed. We also measured blood hemolysis induced by the venom. To test for the development of physiological resistance to fire ant venom we compared whole-body performance and hemolysis for two populations of lizards with different fire ant invasion histories. Fire ant venom showed no dosage-dependent sublethal effects on performance. In addition, there is no evidence that lizards have evolved increased physiological resistance: the impact of fire ant venom on whole-body performance and hemolysis did not differ between the naïve and experienced populations. Lizards may instead rely on adaptive shifts in escape behavior and morphology following invasion to survive fire ant attack., ((c) 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.)