HEAL provides facilities for safely exposing human subjects, in a controlled and monitored environment, to air pollutants and pharmacological aerosols. The animal inhalation laboratory provides facilities for exposing animals to gases, VOCs, particles, particle-gas mixtures, infectious agents, antigens, and carcinogens. The Community Exposure Laboratory provides expertise, instrumentation, and sampling protocols for the conduct of community-based human exposure studies. This core facility develops, purchases, tracks and maintains instrumentation for sampling community and indoor environmental contaminants for the purpose of assessing exposure. Duties include calibration and maintenance of pumps, dosimeters, and a variety of direct-reading instruments, as well as conducting field surveys.
Technical support is provided for training field personnel and some laboratory analyses.
Properly maintained instrumentation is needed to ensure the timely availability of sampling and analytical equipment. Current analytical capability includes VOCs, NO2, particle mass, CO, lead and nicotine in air, as well as lead in surface dust, and allergens in surface and air samples. Analytical equipment supported by the core includes two GCs, SEM, X-ray spectrometer, light microscopes, analytical balances, and a visible spectrophotometer. Field sample collection will be conducted by the Field Technician. These facilities include low, high and ultraspeed centrifugation, liquid scintillation and gamma spectroscopy, visible and UV spectrometry, liquid and gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, chemiluminescence and photography.