Get on the (Environmental) Bus

By Ross Tomlin

Winifred Hamilton, Ph.D., led the Houston Community and Environmental Health Tour.

The afternoon started out ominously overcast last fall when 30 Baylor College of Medicine medical students and others boarded a tour bus for what was to most of them a journey into the unknown.

The mission of this Houston Community and Environmental Health Tour, coordinated by Winifred Hamilton, Ph.D., director of BCM's Environmental Health section, was to teach the students onboard about the environment in and around Harris County. To accomplish this, she recruited several experts on the city's environmental and cultural history.

"Many students are unaware of their surroundings outside the classroom," Hamilton said. "Doctors need to know not only what goes on inside their patients' bodies but also what goes on outside that can affect their health."

Clean up, aisle three

As a light sprinkle descended, the expedition proceeded to Houston's Third and Sixth Wards, both focuses of recent gentrification and renovation, said Stephen Fox, an architecture expert from Rice University. However, urban development and remodeling of older areas do not necessarily remove environmental health risks, such as lead levels in paints, he and other experts warned.

The tour visited the Houston Ship Channel.

En route to the Houston Ship Channel region – the city's petrochemical hub – James Rhubottom, Jr., an environmental chemist with the Houston Department of Health and Human Services Bureau of Air Quality Control, briefed the passengers on the challenges of monitoring the city's mucky air.

With the help of a mobile laboratory, which he characterized as an electronic bloodhound, Rhubottom and others will be able to determine the exact sources of the city's excessive ozone, benzene and other air pollutants and will hopefully lead to curbing their output.

Turn for the worse

Along a less-traveled Fifth Ward street, eerie, nondescript black barrels were strewn about an unattended 36-acre Superfund site, a depository for hazardous wastes, with but a chain-link fence along its perimeter. Two blocks to the west sat Bruce Elementary School.

"You can imagine with an elementary school of approximately 500 students right across the street from a Superfund site, there is a lot of concern that those children are oftentimes exposed to these issues," said Museum of Cultural Arts executive director Reginald Adams.

Macario Ramirez, owner of Latino culture community hub Casa Ramirez, urged medical students to learn as much as they could about their patients' cultures, which would help them become better, more sensitive doctors one day.

Fortunately, private investment and grassroots efforts have partnered with the city of Houston to eventually clean up and redevelop the area.

Third-year medical student Sarah Christiansen, who grew up in Houston, saw a side of the city she didn't realize existed.

"It's important to increase awareness of environmental issues," said Christiansen. "If we're completely unaware, then we're never going to be helpful."

As the rainfall billowed into an unmerciful downpour, Jane Laping, executive director of the advocacy group Mothers for Clean Air, declared that many schools suffer from their proximity to pollution sources, including freeways.

"A lot of pollution comes from the traffic along the freeway, particularly from diesel engines," said Laping. "Eventually, we hope to get a law in Texas that limits the distance that schools can be located to heavily traveled roads."

Neighborhood watch

In communities along the Houston Ship Channel, the passengers viewed first-hand the air pollution endemic to the low-income neighborhoods of Manchester, Milby Park and Allendale, where lax zoning laws permit chemical distillation towers to loom large over many backyards. Nearby, Cesar Chavez High School's citadel-like exterior belied its susceptibility to the same airborne health risks.

Dr. Hamilton, center, and the other participants met with people in several affected neighborhoods.

"The Port of Houston, the ship channel and refinery row opened my eyes to how one's community can affect one's health greatly," said third-year medical student Gabriel De La Garza. "It's one thing for someone to say, 'I live in East Houston,' but it's quite another to see jumping flames from the refinery towers from their front yard yourself."

Hamilton concluded the tour with a call to arms of sorts, challenging the future physicians on the bus to learn more about environmental exposure and its effect on patients' health.

"If a mother brings you a child who's having problems with headaches and asthma, what are some environmental health exposure questions you might ask?" proposed Hamilton. "It's not just enough to give somebody a pill if they're still being exposed."