A poster highlighting research testing indoor air quality’s relation to the elevated incidence of asthma and respiratory issues in Dearborn, MI, and River Rouge, MI, was awarded the grand prize at ASSE’s Safety 2017 Research Poster Session.

The contest finalists presented their posters in Denver at Safety 2017 from June 19-22. Mary Asher and Erika Cleary from Oakland University won Overall Grand Prize in the contest’s student category.

“I was so excited,” Asher says. “We were overjoyed, actually.”

ASSE’s poster session aims to stimulate interest in OSH research, identify key issues in OSH, expand knowledge and improve professional skills, contribute to the ASSE Body of Knowledge, and identify emerging issues relevant to the profession. Held each year at ASSE’s annual conference, the research poster session invites OSH educators, students, professionals and researchers to submit original contributions related to OSH that is displayed in an educational poster format.

“The outdoor air quality issues plaguing these areas is also creating indoor air pollution that is problematic to those who reside or work in these communities,” Asher and Cleary explain. “Indoor air pollution may be contributing to the high instances of asthma and respiratory issues found in the study area.”

“We wanted to pick a topic that was relevant to our community and to the metro Detroit area,” Asher says. “We were researching trying to find some kind of public health issue and then we stumbled upon some articles that depicted a health crisis in the Detroit area regarding outdoor air quality and air quality in general. When we looked into it,” she says, “we discovered there wasn’t much research on indoor quality in the area. So, we decided that was what we wanted to do to study different occupational public settings in River Rouge and Dearborn and see what the air quality was like indoors, since there was a gap in research.”

According to Cleary, their research found elevated levels of particulate and/or gaseous pollutants. “This highlights the need for further research to understand how air quality influences respiratory health and impacts the increase in asthma incidents in these areas,” Cleary says. The asthma rate in these areas was about 5 times higher than the state average, Cleary says.

Asthma incidents were elevated across the “whole Metro Detroit area compared to the rest of Michigan,” Asher says.

“Our premise for the study was that there are all of these big industrial sources of pollution in the area,” Asher says. “We figured that could have an influence on the instance of asthma.”

Going forward, Asher and Cleary hope the university’s ASSE student section will take their research further. “We left that as an open possibility,” Cleary says, “for others to continue our research. We put it in our newsletter to anyone who might be interested know.”

Asher and Cleary’s faculty advisor Richard Olawoyin “said he is there to support us in whatever research we choose to pursue,” Cleary says. “There is always a possibility of doing more research.”

Asher says several other types of facilities and companies could be sampled. “We had a time limit on our research, so we did not receive responses from many of the companies we reached out to. If the research were to be continued,” she says, the researchers could collect samples at the facilities that were not tested. “That would be great for this research project,” she says.