Jaclyn's Environmental Health Blog

The home assessment questionnaire is an easy and helpful tool to identify potential health hazards in your home. Prior to seeing this assessment, I had not thought about assessing the lead in my water because I had assumed that my water is safe in San Francisco. It is helpful to know the year the building was built to get a better idea of potential health exposures as these houses were built before housing regulations were put in place. Even though my house was built in the 2000s, I am now curious to know if/how to test for lead and radon. My house has a basement, which is only accessible from the outside and used for storage purposes only. Having someone living in the basement would expose them to higher levels of radon since they are closer to the source. We are supposed rely on government officials to create policies and regulations to keep the population safe from environmental health risks but this assumption has shown to be wrong. Ultimately, we are responsible for our own ho...

I found our first class discussion regarding the environmental exposures around us to be shocking. I had always known that there were exposures around us that were hazardous to our health, however I never took the time to list out the potential exposures around me. The list of exposures our group compiled was longer than I had initially assumed and most could be found in all four categories: home, school, workplace, and community. This was only the first class discussion and I have already begun to look at everything around me differently in regards to how it can impact my health. For example, our office had just received boxes of Lucky Charms but during our class discussion, we discussed how glyphosate was found in cereals. This discussion had deterred me from consuming the cereal, when I normally would have.