Developing An Effective Community Ethical Review Model

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Despite federal policies that are designed to protect human subjects involved in scientific research studies, serious ethical challenges continue to occur in environmental health research that appear to negatively impact the safety and welfare of communities of color and low-income communities. This problem will be addressed by an interdisciplinary research team drawn from an existing collaboration between West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc. (WE ACT), the NIEHS Center For Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan, and the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health (the latter organizations are both part of Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health) who will implement an educational and demonstration project, "Developing an Effective Community Ethical Review Model." The project will educate researchers (specifically, Principal Investigators and Co-Investigators of NIEHS-funded studies) and community members (specifically, community-based organization advisors and research partners on NIEHS- or CDC- funded studies and others who are working on environmental health issue sin communities of color- most of whom are women of color) on the best practices for bolstering human subject protection. This will bc accomplished through the development, implementation, and evaluation of a replicable model for ensuring effective community review of gene-environment and non-therapeutic environmental health research. (Specifically, the project will focus on ethical issues regarding research on the etiology and exacerbation of asthma [including genetic factors] and home-based interventions on asthma and lead. These research studies have been chosen because the project team has broad experience with these studies and because such studies are of nationwide interest.) The demonstration model will be based upon (1) an assessment of community members', researchers', and health funders' knowledge of environmental health hazards and research ethics; (2) case studies of existing community ethical review models; (3) linguistically and culturally appropriate educational materials and trainings on environmental health and research ethics; (4) local and national dialogues regarding research ethics; and (5) evaluation of all project activities.