Impact of environmental inequity on health outcome: where is the epidemiological evidence?

A significant amount of evidence reveals a presence of environmental inequity. Although there is a disproportionate distribution of waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities, and chemical and manufacturing plants in minority and low-income communities in the United States, little research has been devoted to show any associations based on analytic epidemiological methods. To date, attempts to quantify health disparities have included demographic data, race, sex, income, other socioeconomic factors, and broad symptomatic survey instruments. To study this, we examined the latest epidemiological evidence documenting the existence of adverse health impacts resulting from environmental inequity. We observed that the overwhelming majority of studies were descriptive in nature and lacked comparison populations. As a result, we believe that further research based on analytic epidemiological methods would further contribute to the determination of the cause-effect relationship between environmental exposure and health outcome.