Southwest Center for Agricultural Health, Injury Prevention and Education

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The NIOSH Southwest Center for Agricultural Health, Injury Prevention, and Education (SW Center) at The University of Texas Health Center at Tyler (UTHCT), is completing its tenth year of operation, serving U.S. Public Health Region VI including Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. The work of the SW Center will continue to be characterized by: 1) strong regional involvement through collaborative partnerships with a multi-disciplinary team of researchers affiliated with institutions throughout the five-state region and along the largest segment of shared border with Mexico; 2) highly participatory external and internal advisory boards; and 3) a scope of work addressing special worker populations. This SW Center proposal is responsive to the current Program Announcement in numerous respects. The theme of the Center, "Innovative Approaches to Address Workers in Special Agricultural Populations," reflects how the outreach activities, projects, and merit-based pilot program study areas will address a number of issues characterizing the diversity of agriculture and populations in this region. Research projects cover a wide array of topics- the study of chronic disease indicators among migrant adolescent farm workers, agricultural chemical and contaminant influences on gene expression, worker health protection among shrimp fishermen of the Gulf Coast, and exposure and health assessment in cattle finishing operations. Prevention/intervention projects will examine health factors influencing the work risks for agricultural aviators, the impact of health messages on health protection and risk reduction of youth in agricultural environments, and deriving competencies in agricultural health issues for community health workers or promotoras. Education/translation projects include establishing model farms for pesticide education on the Navajo Nation and effective methods of educating foresters and loggers in hearing conservation. Many of these projects have synergies and rely upon acquiring and analyzing data relative to risk, addressing the challenges of building stakeholder partnerships, reaching farming populations, developing culturally appropriate tools for motivating change through community input, and evaluating outcomes from these efforts. The SW Center is poised in the coming grant cycle to deliver an integrated program whose administration and projects "will address the entire continuum of a problem from identification/causation through translation."