News & Events

 

Calabrese honored for international contributions

Edward Calabrese, professor of toxicology in the Department of Public Health, is being honored by the International CCN Society during its annual workshop Oct. 20-24 in Newcastle, Northern Ireland.

In recognition of his scientific achievements, Calabrese is being presented the ICCNS-Springer Award by the society, which is devoted to the diffusion of information related to the CNN family of genes and proteins.

A member of the faculty since 1976, Calabrese is the foremost expert in the world on a chemical dose-response phenomenon known as hormesis, through which doses of some chemicals are stimulative or promote growth but higher doses are toxic or inhibit growth. His research has led to important discoveries that indicate that the most fundamental dose response in toxicology and pharmacology is the hormetic-biphasic dose response relationship. These observations are leading to a major transformation in improving drug discovery, development and in the efficiency of the clinical trial, as well as the scientific foundations for risk assessment and environmental regulation for radiation and chemicals.

Calabrese has researched extensively in the area of host factors affecting susceptibility to pollutants, and is the author of more than 600 papers in scholarly journals and 10 books, including "Principles of Animal Extrapolation," "Nutrition and Environmental Health," Vols. I and II, "Ecogenetics," "Multiple Chemical Interactions," "Air Toxics and Risk Assessment" and "Biological Effects of Low Level Exposures to Chemicals and Radiation." Along with Mark Mattson, he is a co-editor of the recently published book "Hormesis: A Revolution in Biology, Toxicology and Medicine."

Calabrese has been a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and NATO Countries Safe Drinking Water committees and served on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. He also serves as chairman of the Biological Effects of Low Level Exposures and directs the campus-based Northeast Regional Environmental Public Health Center.

He was awarded the 2009 Marie Curie Prize for his body of work on hormesis.

October 21, 2010.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ed Calabrese Awarded Certificate of Recognition by the Publisher Elsevier.
Ed Calabrese, Professor in the Environmental Health Sciences Division in the Department of Public Health, was awarded a Certificate of Recognition by the publisher Elsevier. Dr. Calabrese's article, Biological stress response terminology: Integrating the concepts of adaptive response and preconditioning stress within a hormetic dose-response framework, is one of Elsevier's Top Ten cited articles on SCOPUS for the calendar years 2007-2008. Dr. Calabrese's article appeared in the July 1, 2007 issue of the journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology, published by Elsevier.

Dr. Calabrese is a nationally renowned expert in the field of hormesis, which examines the potential benefits of otherwise toxic substances when taken in small doses. The article offers a set of recommendations to achieve greater conceptual harmony of biological stress terminology, across the broad spectrum of biological disciplines within a hormetic dose-response context.
August 2, 2010
________________________________________________________________________


Soloe Dennis, a UMass graduate with his MS in Public Health-Environmental Health Sciences, completes the Master Exercise Practitioner program!

Media Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 15, 2010

PVPC Staff Member Completes Emergency Planning Training

Soloe Dennis, Pioneer Valley Planning Commission Public Health Emergency Preparedness Planner for the Hampden County Health Coalition, recently completed the Master Exercise Practitioner program (MEP) at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Emergency Management Institute in Emmetsburg, Maryland.

The FEMA Emergency Management Institute created the Master Exercise Practitioner program to recognize those individuals who have completed its prescribed training program and demonstrated, through hands-on application, a high degree of professionalism and capability in the area of emergency management and preparedness. Currently, there are fewer than 1,700 MEPS in the United States. 

As a certified Master Exercise Practitioner, Dennis has exhibited mastery of exercise program management in accordance with the policy, doctrine, practice, and tools in the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. In his capacity at PVPC, he designs, develops, and evaluates exercises for all 19 municipal health departments and boards in Hampden County. He also serves as an expert on regional and local exercises for emergency preparedness.  
June 15, 2010
______________________________________________________________________

Climate Change Could Make Allergy Season Worse, says aerobiologist Rogers
A new study of the relationship between carbon dioxide levels and plant growth suggests for the first time that not only do plants grow bigger and produce more pollen when exposed to higher levels of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, but the common, allergen-producing fungus Alternaria alternate (right) produces three times more spores when feeding on those enriched plants. The spores disperse on the wind, making allergies and asthma symptoms worse.

Although such well-fed spores may contain less protein per spore, if models of climate disruption and global temperature rise are correct, the overall increase in airway-irritating antigen to which people will be exposed in 2040 will be roughly two times higher than now, according to Christine Rogers, an aerobiologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences.

As she explains, “The fungi have an enriched food source and produced three times as many spores, but less protein per spore. Overall, the amount of antigen people are going to be exposed to is roughly twice as high. This is the first time we know of that a study has looked at the level of antigen in fungal spores in response to carbon dioxide.”

The research group, including another UMass Amherst researcher, Michael Muilenberg, plus colleagues at the University of Maryland and the USDA Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville, Md., reported these results in the online current edition of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

It has been known for some time that increasing levels of CO2 can increase the ability of some plants to grow larger and produce more pollen, making life miserable for people who are allergic to the tiny irritants. The increase in available carbon lets plants produce more carbohydrates and proteins, which serve as additional nutrients for fungi that feed on the plants. Spores from Alternaria, a fungus that lives on plants and in soil, similarly triggers asthma and allergic symptoms. Nearly 12 percent of asthma sufferers are sensitive to this fungus, and in some places the percentage is higher.

For the study, Rogers and colleagues studied how four different CO2 levels in the air, 300, 400, 500 and 600 parts per million (ppm), controlled in environment chambers, affected biomass production and leaf carbon content of timothy grass, a common hay crop.

The four CO2 levels are intended to simulate four global averages over time: 19th century (300 ppm), current levels (400 ppm), and two higher levels we’re predicted to reach by approximately 2025 (500 ppm) and 2040 (600 ppm), by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, some urban areas already average 500 ppm of this greenhouse gas in the air because of high traffic and other emissions, Rogers points out.

The researchers then inoculated the grass with Alternaria spores and measured the fungal spore production. They found that plants grown at higher CO2 levels predicted to be reached around 2025 and 2040, showed increased carbon:nitrogen (C:N) ratios. Plants grown at the highest level also produced more biomass. Finally, Alternaria grown on these carbon-rich leaves produced nearly three times more spores.

In further analyses conducted in Rogers’ laboratory at UMass Amherst, she and Muilenberg determined the concentration of antigenic protein, the key component in allergic reactions, in the spores of the fungus growing on the carbon-rich plants.

The researchers suggest that more work is needed to understand how changes in the more highly exposed grass led to increased spore production in the fungus, “but the current study suggests that for allergy and asthma sufferers, exposure to fungal spores may be an increasing problem as atmospheric CO2 levels rise,” they conclude.
May 20, 2010.
_______________________________________________________________________

UMass Amherst Researcher Edward Calabrese Receives Marie Curie Prize for Work on Hormesis, Low-Dose Radiation and Health
AMHERST, Mass. – Edward Calabrese, a professor in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been awarded the Marie Curie Prize for “outstanding achievements in research on the effects of low and very low doses of ionizing radiation on human health and biotopes.”

At an international conference this week at UMass Amherst, Andre Maisseu, president of the Paris-based World Council of Nuclear Workers, announced that Calabrese is the council’s 2009 Curie Prize winner. Maisseu saluted Calabrese during the annual meeting of the International Dose-Response Society, of which Calabrese, an environmental toxicologist, is a founder and current director. Maisseu said the prize recognizes an entire body of research that has improved scientific knowledge of low-dose ionizing radiation effects on human beings and biological communities. A formal award ceremony will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in September.

While Calabrese is the foremost expert in the world on a chemical dose-response phenomenon known as hormesis, he has done little dose-response work with ionizing radiation, he observes. However, he feels deeply honored by the council’s recognition. “I accept that I’m being given credit for bridging the gap between chemical hormesis and ionizing radiation,” he says, “and I do believe there is evidence to bridge it. What I have urged all along is for mainstream science to see hormesis as a basic biological principle.”

Hormesis describes the fact that low doses of some chemicals are stimulative or promote growth but higher doses are toxic or inhibit growth, for example. The Marie Curie Prize winner, who joined the UMass Amherst faculty in 1976, says, “We need to conduct the research?which has been long neglected?to understand hormesis more fully, with all its implications.”

The theory’s proponents suggest that low doses of minerals in multivitamin pills such as chromium and selenium, for example, boost health not because they provide required nutrients but because low doses of many toxins stimulate biological systems with beneficial mild stress, while higher doses are toxic. By contrast, the prevailing linear threshold model of toxin behavior says the absence of harmful effects below the threshold assumes there are no effects relevant to health.

Calabrese and colleagues’ work on chemical hormesis sparked vigorous scientific debate and a special section in the journal, Science, in 1989. Challenged to subject hormesis experiments to more rigorous statistical standards, Calabrese and his longtime UMass Amherst collaborator, Linda Baldwin, created a database of 21,000 papers. In 2003, they reported in a ground-breaking paper that the low-dose stimulatory effect of chemicals is typically about 40 percent enhanced growth, for example.

“It was a coming-out party for hormesis,” Calabrese recalls. “We made a credible case and we did it by following the scientific rules of the game,” he says of their work over the past 30 years. By contrast, he says, the two leading risk assessment models used by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration have been imposed on society and the scientific community without being vetted or validated.

Everyday implications of hormesis for risk assessment are significant. If chemical hormesis is a basic biological principle, Calabrese says, society is needlessly over-regulating the environment to protect against low exposures that are not dangerous, and we’re missing possible benefits. “The traditional threshold model is not very good at explaining or accounting for data that’s below the toxic threshold, and that’s where we live. But hormesis is quite good at that.”

Major Implications for Public Health Policy

Mark Mattson, chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, one of Calabrese’s past co-authors, agrees that the findings for which Calabrese is being recognized with the Marie Curie Prize “have major implications for public health policy regarding environmental ‘toxins,’ for the design of biomedical studies, and for the discovery of new therapeutic interventions for a range of diseases.”

Mattson adds that the UMass Amherst research clearly reveals that “hormesis as a widespread feature of biological systems (cells, tissues, organisms and populations) that was previously either unrecognized or ignored by scientists in the fields of biology, biomedical research and toxicology. Calabrese and colleagues have shown that biological systems very often respond adaptively to low amounts of toxins and other stresses (radiation, heat, etc.) so as to increase their resistance to more severe stress and disease.”

Maisseu says it’s unfortunate that most research on ionizing radiation conducted since nuclear weapons were developed has focused on its harmfulness. This has prevented valuable work on possible beneficial low-dose effects, including adaption and repair mechanisms, he feels. Further, anti-hormesis prejudice has deprived the scientific community of fundamental knowledge which might be uncovered, and which is needed to pursue the fight against the different forms of cancer, Maisseu adds.

He therefore salutes Calabrese’s “courageous opposition to this indefensible position with regard to scientific research.” Recalling the famous statement by the 15th century toxicologist, Paracelsus, that all substances are poison and only dose makes a poison, Maisseu adds, “Calabrese dared to undertake work making it possible to correctly appreciate the relationship between dose and effect in many areas of toxicology and biology, and to highlight numerous examples of the hormesis phenomenon.”
May 1, 2009
________________________________________________________________________

SPHHS Winter 2010 Newsletter

 

SPHHS Running Club
Tuesdays and Thursdays
5:30 PM
Group meets on the 1st floor of Arnold House