Organochlorines in New York and the Hudson River: Sources, Environmental Distribution, and Health Risks

Overview

Objectives

The Mount Sinai Superfund Basic Research Program is a collaborative multidisciplinary program project. It is jointly funded, like 18 others across the country, by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The Mount Sinai program focuses on organochlorines and other persistent pollutants in the watershed of the lower Hudson River, a densely populated, heavily industrialized 300-kilometer-long region that includes New York City. The watershed is contaminated by a complex mix of pollutants, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), DDT, chlordane, dieldrin, dioxin, and mercury. More recently, brominated flame retardants and alkylphenolethoxylates have been added to this mix. Because of its contamination with PCBs, the Hudson River from upstream of Albany to the southern tip of Manhattan has been designated by EPA as the nation’s longest Superfund site.

The projects within the Program center on three well-defined objectives:

• To determine current urban sources of persistent pollutants, particularly organochlorines;
• To assess current environmental distributions of these substances;
• To determine potential chronic, toxic effects of such materials to human health

Goals

• To identify the primary sources of persistent organochlorines in the watershed of the lower Hudson River and New York City;
• To define the environmental fate, transport, and distribution of these materials;
• To identify and evaluate associations between these persistent pollutants, disease, and dysfunction;
• To elucidate biological mechanisms through which organochlorines may cause disease and dysfunction;
• To prevent dysfunction, disease, and environmental degradation that may be caused by organochlorines.

Specific Objectives

1. To conduct geochemical research that:
   • identifies past and current sources of organochlorines contaminants in the Hudson River watershed,
   • analyzes changes over time, their environmental fate and transport, and
   • describes their current distribution;
2. To undertake biomedical research that:
   • examines interactions between organochlorines and the human genome, with particular emphasis on elucidating the health impacts of genetically determined inter-individual differences in susceptibility;
   • assesses endocrine mechanisms of toxicity; and
   • studies neurotoxicity, including the early as well as the delayed effects on the central nervous system of early exposures to organochlorines;
3. To educate, empower, and build sustainable partnerships with people of the communities that comprise our region in order that they may more effectively address the problems of persistent chemical contamination that confront them;
4. To educate the next generation of leaders in environmental health research; and
5. To build and sustain strong partnerships with agencies of federal, state and local government, especially the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that have the responsibility for managing and ameliorating hazardous chemical wastes, in order that these agencies may have ready access to our expertise and also so that our program may be guided by their knowledge and experience.