The People's Doctor

As a physician, Gina Solomon tackles pressing environmental health issues in a clinic without walls.

Gina Solomon's wait for a slow elevator in a building at the Harvard School of Public Health was unexpectedly interrupted by one of those life-changing moments. It was around the time she was finishing up work on her fellowship in occupational and environmental medicine, when she noticed on a nearby bulletin board a job posting for a senior scientist at NRDC. Solomon thought she would be a perfect fit. She applied for the position, got the job, and upon graduation packed her bags and headed for NRDC's San Francisco office.

Solomon's early years at NRDC were spent advocating for the protection of children and families from the environmental health threats that affect them most: toxic chemicals in the home, diesel pollution from school buses, lead in drinking water, and mercury in fish. She also received a clinical appointment at the University of California at San Francisco's medical school, where she began teaching medical students and residents about environmental health. She is now the associate director of the medical center's pediatric environmental health specialty unit, where she acts as an expert resource for parents and pediatricians.

Solomon's policy work at NRDC had consistently been both effective and personally rewarding. But something was missing; she found herself longing to spend more time in the field--to engage more directly with the people on the ground most affected by the issues that she worked on in her NRDC office. That opportunity would present itself, tragically, after Hurricane Katrina.

In the aftermath of the deadly storm, an array of new public health concerns arose, many of them related to the toxic debris left in the storm's wake. Residents of New Orleans found they were not receiving adequate help--or even the straight facts--from public officials.

"The community groups didn't trust the Environmental Protection Agency or the state agency to tell the truth, and they were worried about chemical contamination. So they asked us to do some testing," Solomon recalls. "It was hard to say no." She soon found herself on a plane bound for the Gulf Coast, embarking on a new phase of her career.

Solomon ended up making six trips to New Orleans to conduct environmental surveys and to collect soil, air, and water samples to test for a broad array of contaminants and pathogens, from arsenic and lead to bacteria and mold. The trips resulted in the collection of valuable data that helped local communities fight for government-funded cleanup of the region. But for Solomon, the New Orleans visits yielded much more than data.

"I was finally able to combine the personal relationships I develop in the clinic with the investigation of larger public health issues," Solomon says. "And suddenly I had a much clearer understanding of why environmental justice really matters."

Since then, Solomon has applied this approach to other communities around the country. For instance, she has visited neighborhoods in California that are located near large cement kilns, which are collectively responsible for 90 percent of airborne mercury emissions in the state and are a major source of global warming pollution.

In the small desert town of Oro Grande, California, about an hour and a half northeast of Los Angeles, a cement kiln operates just a few hundred feet from people's homes. What look like innocuous white plumes drifting from the smokestacks contain particulate air pollution, lead, mercury, and other heavy metals. On the worst days, residents wake to find their cars and their children's bikes and swing sets blanketed in white dust.

Solomon is now fighting for tougher regulation of cement kilns, and her sampling trips have led to the collection of data that may help reduce the threat they pose to nearby communities. The project is a perfect synthesis of Solomon's field research, her expertise in clinical medicine, and her skill in effecting public-health policy reform.

On one recent trip to Oro Grande, Solomon and her team spent time with a local family at their home, listening to their stories. It was personally rewarding and also professionally gratifying: in dealing directly with people threatened by society's most pressing health problems, Solomon had finally broken down the boundaries of her offices at NRDC and the University of California; her work has expanded into a clinic without walls. 

Ask Dr. Gina

If you're one of those people who are always on the lookout for everyday actions you can take to protect your health, your home, and the planet, check out NRDC's Web site simplesteps.org. There you can share your own tips for green living and pick up new ideas from others. Got a pressing environmental health question? Post it to "Ask Dr. Gina," where Gina Solomon, a physician and NRDC scientist, answers readers' concerns.