Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Christine Murekeyisoni, MPH¹, Julien Terrell, BS², Laurene Tumiel-Berhalter, PhD¹, Judith Anderson, BA², and Edith Williams, MS³. (1) Department of Family Medicine, State Univeristy of New York at Buffalo, 173 CC, ECMC, 462 Grider Street, Buffalo, NY 14215, 716-898-4564, cm72@buffalo.edu, (2) State University of New York at Buffalo, 2495 Main Street, Suite 462, Buffalo, NY 14214, (3) Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, State University of New York at Buffalo, 3435 Main Street, Farber Hall, Room 265, Buffalo, NY 14214

In 2001 a group of concerned residents on the east side of Buffalo New York, a community that is predominately African-American, approached scientists at the University at Buffalo (UB) about a number of their neighbors who had been diagnosed with lupus and other autoimmune diseases. They wanted to find out exactly how many people in their neighborhood had lupus, and why they were becoming ill. They hypothesized that the situation could be linked to environmental toxic pollutants resulting from waste sites present in the area they live in. In response to those questions, the Buffalo Lupus Project, a partnership between the University at Buffalo and the Toxic Waste/Lupus Coalition, was established to investigate these issues. This presentation will highlight: 1) the techniques used to develop a city-wide registry for Lupus and other autoimmune diseases, 2) community involvement in designing and administering a comprehensible questionnaire that would help uncover common factors that may clarify the complex causes of lupus, 3) course of action taken to clean up superfund sites that threaten the health of people living in affected communities, focusing on partnerships that were established with local environmental justice organizations. Preliminary results from this project will also be presented.

Learning Objectives:

• • Identify and use community assets to develop partnerships
• • The role of community members in identifying health problems and health hazards in a community
• • Overcoming cultural barriers to community participatory research
• • Identifying untraditional benefits to the community through the research process

Keywords: Community Research, Community-Based Partnership

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No