В Гавайях завершился пятый научный семинар по регистрации последствий разлива авиатоплива в Ред-Хилл

The Red Hill Registry, facilitated by the University of Hawaiʻi, hosted its fifth Scientific Oversight Workshop last week on UH Mānoa’s campus, bringing together a mix of UH teams, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and national environmental health experts. Led by the Thompson School Registry Hub, one of the collaborating units at the Red Hill Registry, the event worked to understand existing environmental data and the registry’s early exposure data to assess which information would be useful for determining exposure in future health research of registry participants. “As a result of this workshop and our cross-sector expert dialogue, we are able to begin to frame our approach to assessing an individual’s exposure to jet-fuel-contaminated water,” said Rosana “Sanie” Weldon, director of the Red Hill Registry. Water experts, hydrologists, microbiologists and chemists from the Water Resources Research Center (WRRC) and Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education shared project-related updates on jet fuel degradation by fuel-eating microbes, hydraulic modeling of the Red Hill water lines, chemical compound classifications, early water screening results and more. The Red Hill Registry shared current research methodologies, early exposure data reported by registry participants and community outreach efforts aimed at increasing the scientific rigor of the data being collected by the registry. “The types of studies and health analyses that we want to be able to investigate will only be really effective if there’s a large cohort of folks enrolled and participating with the registry,” said Eamonn Clarke, postdoctoral researcher in the Marron Lab within WRRC and presenter at the Scientific Oversight Workshop. The group discussed the challenges of complex data sets as well as how to conduct future research with assumptions and generalizations for unknown data. “We have made a lot of progress at the workshop toward understanding what was in the water, when, and which areas were hardest hit. All of those things matter as we try to understand the health issues that emerged,” said Gina Solomon, Chief of the Division of Occupational, Environmental, and Climate Medicine at University of California, San Francisco. The next Red Hill Registry Scientific Oversight Workshop is proposed for spring 2027. Co-designed with the community, the Red Hill Registry aims to track health outcomes to inform future research and clinical guidance on fuel exposure and provide resources for the estimated 93,000 people who experienced the fuel spill.