Preventive Medicine Grand Rounds- From Evidence to Intervention: Asthma Triggers Home Assessment Training

Public Health Grand Rounds (PHGR) will continue to promote Preventive Medicine Grand Rounds (PMGR) while our monthly PHGR sessions are on hold. We welcome your questions. Please email us at grandrounds@cdc.gov

Preventive Medicine Grand Rounds- From Evidence to Intervention: Asthma Triggers Home Assessment Training

In this grand rounds, Dr. Chew, whose research focuses on exposure assessment of aeroallergens and fungi in the indoor environment, presents a training course, developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as a tool for public health practitioners conducting home assessments for asthma triggers and to enable clinicians to start the conversation with their patients about reducing environmental triggers of asthma in homes.

During the presentation, Ginger will cover a wide range of topics such as particle size distribution of common asthma triggers, differences between allergens and irritants, explanations of building heating and cooling systems that can affect asthma triggers, and how to best mitigate exposures to protect health. Additionally, she will highlight how the cross-agency work group selected and put together the content for the training course by reviewing existing data and the latest research. Some of the new findings resulted in a paradigm shift for physicians’ recommendations to decrease exposure to some types of allergens in homes.