By: Ashton Davis
The twin training and research grants build upon successful collaborations between UTMB’s Professor Gregory C. Gray (co-principal investigator in the training grant) and Mongolian scholars during the past 15 years which have generated more than 25 research publications. Professor Gray remarked “I am very pleased to be working with my friends and colleagues
at MNUMS and Duke in this important work. I am confident the GEOHealth Center will greatly help the Mongolian people.”
The GEOHealth Center will be headquartered at MNUMS; however, Mongolian graduate students will train over a three-month period at either UTMB or Duke University prior to commencing their projects. The Center will address new environmental and occupational
problems that have recently arisen in Mongolia due to large migrations of Mongolians from rural areas to the cities. For instance, due to the absence of clean energy for the ~1.6 million people now living in Mongolia’s capital city of Ulaanbaatar,
the city suffers some of the worst air pollution in the world. Its people subsequently frequently suffer from viral and other respiratory disease epidemics. Mongolia also suffers from extreme swings in temperature and groundwater contamination from
mining operations. GEOHealth center researchers will study these problems and seek to mitigate them through interventions and policy change.
The U01 research is led by Professor Dambadarjaa Davaalkham (MNUMS) and Professor
Jim Zhang (Duke). Together, with several other faculty, they will conduct one large study and two smaller pilot studies. The
large project is designed to test the hypothesis that air pollution weakens the immune defense against respiratory viral infection. It has three interconnected aims including understanding the relationship between particulate matter exposure and respiratory
viral infection, examining immunologic and viral responses to personal particulate matter exposure, and defining the effects of particulate matter exposure on immune signaling and anti-viral responses.
Professor Zhang commented “Outdoor and indoor air pollution together contribute to approximately 7 million premature deaths globally each year. The death toll is disproportionally high in more polluted places such as Mongolia. The Mongolia GeoHealth
Center research will generate first-hand evidence on how air pollution amplifies respiratory viral infections. This new knowledge can be used to support local air pollution control policies and to help develop preventive practices.”
Professor Davaalkham further explains “In Mongolia, the use of raw fuels can be associated with PM2.5 particle, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide pollution in apartments and houses. While nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, radon from gas stoves,
and tobacco smoke are common and harmful to health in apartments. It is necessary to determine whether the concentrations of these pollutants in homes have changed due to the ban of raw coal in 2019. This project will establish the first GeoHub Center,
which will make an important contribution to human resource capacity, training and research, and promote development in occupational and environmental health in Mongolia.”
A long-term goal of the GEOHealth Center is to strengthen environmental and occupational health research in Mongolia such that their research will improve the health of Mongolia’s people for many years to come as well as serve as a successful example
of health problem mitigation which other countries may follow.