Showing Hydrogen Sulfide Monitoring Project at National Institute of Environmental Health Science

Deborah Thomas, Executive Director for Shaletest.org and I presented our two year project tracking hydrogen sulfide emissions in Wyoming communities from oil and gas operations at the National Institute of Environmental Health Science's Partnerships for Environmental Public Health Conference. The conference focused on Environmental Health Literacy and how to increase public attention to and understanding of environmental health threats. The presentation was met with lots of excitement, particularly because of it's use of a low cost tool (photographic paper) and impactful maps. Megan McLaughlin, has been leading development of maps from this project, we're working toward a gallery show of all our results. Elisabeth Wilder and Hannah Gartner are also collaborating on this project.

Some tweets about our talk and panel:

Highlights of the conference for Public Lab folks:

Kathy Session from Environmental Health Funder's Network tweeted about their new paper on open data and collaborations on Environmental Health that features Public Lab:

Building Power Through Data Sharing

On the topic of sharing data, Silent Spring Institute presented a poster on their recent paper:

Pollution Gets Personal: When Study Participants Learn their Own Chemical Levels

This paper shows that research participants want to know the results of biomonitoring data even if it's meaning for their health is uncertain. Their research is an important step forward in convincing academic science to open up study results and in making reporting study results to participants the new norm in exposure research.

Paul English from California's Department of Public Health discussed his work with communities mapping health and exposure data to identify disease patterns with communities.

We also lead a workshop on Balloon Mapping, unfortunately the balloon mapping was rained out, so we retooled and folded our own spectrometers, to great success. It was well timed with the current kickstarter.

Here's a pdf of our talk:

WylieThomasPEPHFINALng.pdf