Our Mission
The mission of the Environmental Health Service (EHS) is to perform
high-quality research on the causes, prevention, and treatment of respiratory
disease. Health effects of air pollution and other environmental stresses
- indoor, outdoor, or occupational - are our primary focus.
Challenge
What are the health consequences of breathing polluted air? Are
certain pollutants more dangerous than others? Are our children,
the rapidly aging population, or individuals with heart disease or
chronic lung disease at a greater risk?
To set protective air-quality standards that are stringent enough but
still cost-effective, regulatory agencies need objective and reliable
scientific information. The Environmental Health Service at Rancho
Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey, California, has been providing
public health agencies and the medical community with answers for over
20 years.
The Principal Investigator, Henry Gong, Jr., M.D., a world renowned
pulmonary specialist, and his staff have an excellent track record of
biomedical accomplishments, including several hundred scientific,
peer-reviewed publications.
By carefully exposing human volunteers to various pollutants (e.g.,
ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide) inside the environmental
chambers, EHS researchers can carefully study how human beings cope with
air pollution. Both healthy people and individuals with known
heart or lung diseases have been studied in the chambers. Children
have also been studied.
Another important research component involves field studies of
volunteer panels to assess short-term pollution exposures and concurrent
respiratory health changes. Field studies may employ
free-living subjects or subjects exposed in our unique movable trailer
chamber.
Clinical studies involving respiratory drugs have been effectively
integrated into the EHS research program, due to the respiratory
interest of Dr. Gong and his research staff and to a large pool of
patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
and who are available for investigations.
