MOLECULAR BIOMARKERS AS MEASURES OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: A PROPOSED HEALTH-ASSESSMENT PARADIGM

ABSTRACT

Environmental equity and justice is a debate about everyone having equal access to environmental protection. Thus, the goal of environmental justice is to administer the protections afforded by our legal and political systems justly and equally to all individuals and communities, not to distribute pollution. The administration of these protections calls for the measurement of alleged inequitable distributions. The purpose of this article is to review and assess the current methodologies for measuring environmental justice and put forth an argument for a new health-based measurement paradigm. This new paradigm would use the relatively new approach of molecular epidemiology designed to incorporate human dosimetry data into environmental epidemiological studies.