Joan A. Casey

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Columbia University

BACKGROUND: Prior research has reported disparities in environmental exposures in the United States, but, to our knowledge, no nationwide studies have assessed inequality in noise pollution. OBJECTIVES: We aimed to a) assess racial/ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in noise pollution in the contiguous United States; and b) consider the modifyi...

The use and functionality of electronic health records (EHRs) have increased rapidly in the past decade. Although the primary purpose of EHRs is clin- ical, researchers have used them to conduct epidemiologic investigations, ranging from cross-sectional studies within a given hospital to longitudinal studies on geographically distributed patients....

Climate change-related hazards and disasters, known to adversely impact physical and mental health outcomes, are also expected to result in human migration above current levels. Environmentally-motivated migration and displacement may lead to the disruption of existing social ties, with potentially adverse consequences for mobile populations as wel...

Background: Unconventional natural gas development has expanded rapidly. In Pennsylvania, the number of producing wells increased from 0 in 2005 to 3,689 in 2013. Few publications have focused on unconventional natural gas development and birth outcomes. Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study using electronic health record data on 9,...

Industrial food animal production (IFAP) is a source of environmental microbial and chemical hazards. A growing body of literature suggests that populations living near these operations and manure-applied crop fields are at elevated risk for several health outcomes. We reviewed the literature published since 2000 and identified four health outcomes...

January 2025 brought devastating wildfires to Los Angeles (LA) County, California, causing poor air quality, destroying homes and businesses, and displacing thousands of people. We used electronic health record data from 3.7 million Kaiser Permanente Southern California members to promptly determine if the 2025 LA Fires increased outpatient acute h...

Older adults may experience worse wildfire fine particulate matter (PM2.5) smoke-related health effects due to conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs). We evaluated whether wildfire PM2.5 was associated with acute hospitalizations among older adults with ADRD, linking modeled daily wildfire PM2.5 concentrations and circ...

Quantifying how hurricanes disrupt educational attainment is essential to evaluating the burden of climate-related disasters. Here, we examine the association between hurricane-force tropical cyclones and educational attainment among elementary and middle school students in all affected areas in the United States during the 2008/2009–2017/2018 scho...

Climate change will increase the frequency of extreme weather events. This means climate-driven events like wildfires and power outages will likely co-occur more often, potentially magnifying their health risks. We characterized three types of climate-driven events—anomalously warm temperatures, wildfire burn zone disasters, and long power outages—...

In the United States, severe weather-driven power outages are increasing in frequency and duration, likely with health consequences. Previous studies examined individual severe weather events (e.g., heatwaves) and focused on large outages in metropolitan areas. Here, we described nationwide spatiotemporal patterns of individual (e.g., tropical cycl...

Climate change will increase the frequency of extreme weather events. This means climate-driven events like wildfires and power outages will likely co-occur more often, potentially magnifying their health risks. We characterized three types of climate-driven events—anomalously warm temperatures, wildfire burn zone disasters, and long power outages—...

Background Long‐term exposure to ambient air pollution–including fine particulate matter <2.5µm in diameter (PM2.5)–has previously been associated with incident dementia. As climate change drives longer and more intense wildfire seasons, exposure to PM2.5 produced by wildfires may be a unique and increasingly important risk factor for dementia. Me...

Background Utility services for electricity, gas, heat, and hot water are necessities for everyday activities (e.g., lighting, cooking, and thermal safety). Utility outages can threaten health; however, information is limited on the prevalence of electricity, gas, heat, and hot water outages in representative studies. We characterized infrastructur...

Background and Objectives Research to identify fetal predictors of infant mortality among singletons born in the United States (US) concludes that poorly understood and unmeasured “confounders” produce a spurious association between fetal size and infant death. We argue that these confounders include Vanishing Twin Syndrome (VTS) -- the clinical ma...

Incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) is 40–100% higher among Black compared with White Americans. Differential exposure to air pollution might partially explain this difference. We aim to determine if early-life exposure to poor air quality is related to late-life brain health among non-Hispanic Black and White Health and R...

Air pollution is inequitably distributed across the United States, whereby minoritized racial/ethnic groups have greater exposure and consequent health effects. To understand present-day disparities, it is important to understand changes over time. We compared relationships between county-level air pollution and segregation in 1940 and present-day...

Although the public health field has increasingly studied the collateral consequences of incarceration, we know little about the health consequences of other forms of criminal legal contact, including probation and parole. Understanding spatial and racial-ethnic variation in probation/parole across US states provides new insights into how community...

During the 2019 coronavirus pandemic, stay‐at‐home policies such as New York's (NY) NY on Pause dramatically reduced traffic congestion. Despite high traffic burden in NY's environmental justice communities, this reduction has not been evaluated through an environmental justice lens—our objective in this analysis. We obtained census tract‐level tra...

Importance Long-term exposure to total fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) is a recognized dementia risk factor, but less is known about wildfire-generated PM 2.5 , an increasingly common PM 2.5 source. Objective To assess the association between long-term wildfire and nonwildfire PM 2.5 exposure and risk of incident dementia. Design, Setting, and...

Identifying sources of air pollution exposure is crucial for addressing their health impacts and associated inequities. Researchers have developed modeling approaches to resolve source‐specific exposure for application in exposure assessments, epidemiology, risk assessments, and environmental justice. We explore six source‐specific air pollution ex...

The exposome concept aims to account for the comprehensive and cumulative effects of physical, chemical, biological, and psychosocial influences on biological systems. To date, limited exposome research has explicitly included climate change-related exposures. We define these exposures as those that will intensify with climate change, including dir...

This Viewpoint discusses the need for research on and mitigation strategies for the potential community and population health effects of cryptocurrency mining, an energy-intensive and noise-producing industry.

Reliable electricity, elevators, heat, hot water, and water are aspects of safe and accessible housing. Interruptions to these services represent a persistent challenge faced by public housing residents in the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). We compiled outage data spanning 2020–2022 from NYCHA’s online service interruptions portal and pai...

Pregnancies ending before 26 weeks contribute 1% of births but 40% of infant deaths in the United States. The rate of these “periviable” births to non-Hispanic (NH) Black women exceeds four times that for NH whites. Small male periviable infants remain most likely to die. NH white periviable males weigh more than their NH Black counterparts. We arg...

Background The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) regulates over 80 contaminants in community water systems (CWS), including those relevant to infant health outcomes. Multi-cohort analyses of the association between measured prenatal public water contaminant concentrations and infant health outcomes are sparse in the US. Objecti...

Children's risk of exposure to carbon monoxide (CO) increases after disasters, likely due to improper generator use during power outages. Here, we evaluate the impact of outages on children's CO-related emergency department (ED) visits in New York State (NYS). We leveraged power outage data spanning 2017-2020 from the NYS Department of Public Servi...

In the United States, severe weather events increasingly drive power outages, likely with health consequences. Studies typically examined individual severe weather events (e.g., heatwaves), focused on large power outages, and considered small geographic areas (e.g., a city). Here, we described the geographic and temporal patterns of all 8+ hour out...

Objectives. To evaluate associations between oil and gas development (OGD) and mental health using cross-sectional data from a preconception cohort study, Pregnancy Study Online. Methods. We analyzed baseline data from a prospective cohort of US and Canadian women aged 21 to 45 years who were attempting conception without fertility treatment (2013–...

Background Structurally racist systems, ideologies and processes generate and reinforce inequities among minoritised racial/ethnic groups. Prior cross-sectional literature finds that place-based structural racism, such as the Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE), correlates with higher infant morbidity and mortality. We move beyond cross-se...

We estimated the effect of community-level natural hazard exposure during prior developmental stages on later anxiety and depression symptoms among young adults and potential differences stratified by gender. We analyzed longitudinal data (2002–2020) on 5585 young adults between 19 and 26 years in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. A binary questi...

The vulnerability of the power grid to severe weather events is a critical issue as climate change is expected to increase extreme events, which can damage components of the power grid and/or lessen electrical power supply, resulting in power outages. However, largely due to an absence of granular spatiotemporal outage data, we lack a robust unders...

Purpose of Review In this narrative review, we summarize the peer-reviewed literature published between 2017 and 2022 that evaluated ambient environmental risk factors for primary headache disorders, which affect more than half of the population globally. Primary headache disorders include migraine, tension-type headache (TTH), and trigeminal and a...

Background In the US, non-Hispanic (NH) Black birthing persons show a two-fold greater risk of fetal death relative to NH white birthing persons. Since males more than females show a greater risk of fetal death, such loss in utero may affect the sex composition of live births born preterm (PTB; <37 weeks gestational age). We examine US birth data f...

Self-reported distances to industrial sources have been used in epidemiology as proxies for exposure to environmental hazards and indicators of awareness and perception of sources. Unconventional oil and gas development (UOG) emits pollutants and has been associated with adverse health outcomes. We compared self-reported distance to the nearest UOG...

Background: Antimicrobial use in livestock production is considered a key contributor to growing antimicrobial resistance in bacteria. In 2015, California became the first state to enact restrictions on routine antimicrobial use in livestock production via Senate Bill 27 (SB27). SB27 further required the California Department of Food and Agricultu...

Background Antibiotic use in food-producing animals can select for antibiotic resistance in bacteria that can be transmitted to people through contamination of food products during meat processing. Contamination resulting in foodborne illness contributes to adverse health outcomes. Some livestock producers have implemented antibiotic use reduction...

Wildfires have become more frequent and intense due to climate change and outdoor wildfire fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) concentrations differ from relatively smoothly varying total PM 2.5 . Thus, we introduced a conceptual model for computing long-term wildfire PM 2.5 and assessed disproportionate exposures among marginalized communities. We u...

Over the last decades, air pollution emissions have decreased substantially; however, inequities in air pollution persist. We evaluate county-level racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in emissions changes from six air pollution source sectors (industry [SO2], energy [SO2, NOx], agriculture [NH3], commercial [NOx], residential [particulate o...

The impacts of homelessness on health and health care access are detrimental. Intervention and efforts to improve outcomes and increase availability of affordable housing have mainly originated from the public health sector and government. The role that large community-based health systems may play has yet to be established. This study characterize...

Wildfire smoke fine particles (PM2.5) are a growing public health threat as wildfire events become more common and intense under climate change, especially in the Western United States. Studies assessing the association between wildfire PM2.5 exposure and health typically summarize the effects over the study area. However, health responses to wildf...

Background In the past decade, electrical power disruptions (outages) have increased in the United States, especially those attributable to weather events. These outages have a range of health impacts but are largely unstudied in children. Here, we investigated the association between outages and unintentional injury hospitalizations, a leading cau...

Antibiotic-resistant infections are a global concern, especially those caused by multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria, defined as those resistant to more than three drug classes. The animal agriculture industry contributes to the antimicrobial resistant foodborne illness burden via contaminated retail meat. In the United States, retail meat is shippe...

Background Urinary tract infections (UTIs) cause significant disease and economic burden. Uncomplicated UTIs (uUTIs) occur in otherwise healthy individuals without underlying structural abnormalities, with uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) accounting for 80% of cases. With recent transitions in healthcare toward virtual visits, data on multi-dr...

The recent increases in wildfire activity in the western United States has coincided with the proliferation of oil and gas development and substantial population growth in the wildland-urban interface. Drilling and operating oil and gas wells is already associated with emissions of harmful pollutants and higher risks of adverse health outcomes for...

Purpose: To evaluate if changes in preterm birth (PTB, <37 weeks of gestation) incidence differed between non-Hispanic (NH) Black and NH white births following the July 1995 Chicago heat wave-among the most severe US heat waves since 1950. Methods: We used an ecologic study design. We obtained birth data from January 1990-December 1996 from the...

Purpose of Review The volume of public health environmental justice (EJ) research produced by academic institutions increased through 2022. However, the methods used for evaluating EJ in exposure science and epidemiologic studies have not been catalogued. Here, we completed a scoping review of EJ studies published in 19 environmental science and ep...

Background and objectives Selection in utero predicts that population stressors raise the standard for how quickly fetuses must grow to avoid spontaneous abortion. Tests of this prediction must use indirect indicators of fetal loss in birth cohorts because vital statistics systems typically register fetal deaths at the 20th week of gestation or lat...

Introduction Myocardial infarction (MI) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States and its risk increases with extreme temperatures. Climate change causes variability in weather patterns, including extreme temperature events that disproportionately affect socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. Many studies on the healt...

Introduction: Traffic-related air pollution can trigger myocardial infarction (MI). However, the hourly hazard period of exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a common traffic tracer, for incident MI has not been fully evaluated. Thus, the current hourly US national air quality standard (100 ppb) is based on limited hourly-level effect estimates, wh...

Evidence linking traffic noise to insulin resistance and diabetes remains scarce and unanswered questions remain regarding the potential effect modification by neighborhood socioeconomic status (nSES). We aimed to assess socioeconomic inequalities in noise exposure, whether road and aircraft noise exposures were associated with insulin resistance o...

Background Posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) are common after acute coronary syndrome (ACS) and predict increased morbidity and mortality. Climate change contributes to worse mental and cardiovascular health outcomes, thus, PTSS represent a potential mechanism linking climate change to adverse cardiovascular outcomes. Because people living in ar...

Background Urinary tract infections (UTIs) cause significant disease and economic burden. Uncomplicated UTIs (uUTIs) occur in otherwise healthy individuals without underlying structural abnormalities, with uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) accounting for 80% of cases. With recent transitions in healthcare toward virtual visits, data on multi-dr...

‘Good data management is not a goal in itself, but rather is the key conduit leading to knowledge discovery and innovation, and to subsequent data and knowledge integration and reuse by the community after the data publication process’ (Wilkinson et al.¹). The scientific community increasingly recognizes that standardized frameworks support transpa...

Background: Overuse of antibiotics contributes to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and is a growing threat to human health worldwide. Previous work suggests a link between antimicrobial use in poultry and human AMR extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli (E coli) urinary tract infections (UTIs). However, few US-based studies exist, and none have...

Power outages threaten public health. While outages will likely increase with climate change, an aging electrical grid, and increased energy demand, little is known about their frequency and distribution within states. Here, we characterize 2018–2020 outages, finding an average of 520 million customer-hours total without power annually across 2447...

Objectives. To determine whether the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave resulted in excess injury (both unintentional and intentional) deaths. Methods. With US death certificate data from December 29, 2013, to July 31, 2021, we generated weekly counts of injury deaths in Washington State and the rest of the country. We used time-series methods to ide...

Energy policy decisions are driven primarily by economic and reliability considerations, with limited consideration given to public health, environmental justice, and climate change. Moreover, epidemiologic studies relevant for public policy typically focus on immediate public health implications of activities related to energy procurement and gene...

This cross-sectional study quantifies exposure to wildfire particulate matter less than 2.5 μm among schoolchildren in California.

People living near oil and gas development are exposed to multiple environmental stressors that pose health risks. Some studies suggest these risks are higher for racially and socioeconomically marginalized people, which may be partly attributable to disparities in exposures. We examined whether racially and socioeconomically marginalized people in...

Background: This study capitalized on coal and oil facility retirements to quantify their potential effects on fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations and cardiorespiratory hospitalizations in affected areas using a generalized synthetic control method. Methods: We identified 11 coal and oil facilities in California that retired between 2...

Background: On 1 January 2018, California implemented Senate Bill 27 (SB27), banning, for the first time in the United States, routine preventive use of antibiotics in food-animal production and any antibiotic use without a veterinarian's prescription. Objectives: Our objective was to assess whether SB27 was associated with decreased antimicrobi...

Background Debate over “social distancing” as a response to the pandemic includes the claim that disrupting clinical and public health programming dependent on human-to-human contact increased non-COVID-19 deaths. This claim warrants testing because novel pathogens will continue to emerge. Tests, however, appear frustrated by lack of a convention f...

Objective: To evaluate the association of short-term exposure to overall fine particulate matter of <2.5 μm (PM2.5 ) and wildfire-specific PM2.5 with emergency department (ED) visits for headache. Background: Studies have reported associations between PM2.5 exposure and headache risk. As climate change drives longer and more intense wildfire sea...

BACKGROUND Overuse of antibiotics contributes to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and is a growing threat to human health worldwide. Previous work suggests a link between antimicrobial use in poultry and human AMR extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli (E coli) urinary tract infections (UTIs). However, few US-based studies exist, and none have c...

Background Community socioeconomic deprivation (CSD) may be related to higher oil and natural gas development (OGD) exposure. We tested for distributive and benefit-sharing environmental injustice in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale by examining (1) whether OGD and waste disposal occurred disproportionately in more deprived communities and (2) discor...

Stationary sources of air pollution are disproportionately located in communities of colour, but the causes for this disparity are unclear. Here we assess whether racialized appraisals of investment risk (‘red-lining’) undertaken by the US federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s influenced the subsequent siting of fossil fuel power plant...

Unlabelled: Since 2010, seismicity in Oklahoma has increased from wastewater injection. It remains unknown if these earthquakes have resulted in increased treatment seeking for mental healthcare services. Methods: Using data from a nationwide United States patient-level commercial and Medicare Advantage claims database from 2010 to 2019, we iden...

Objectives: We aim to contribute to the literature reporting tests of selection in utero. The theory of reproductive suppression predicts that natural selection would conserve mechanisms, referred to collectively as selection in utero, that spontaneously abort fetuses unlikely to thrive as infants in the prevailing environment. Tests of this predi...

Background Precipitated by an unusual winter storm, the 2021 Texas Power Crisis lasted February 10 to 27 leaving millions of customers without power. Such large-scale outages can have severe health consequences, especially among vulnerable subpopulations such as those reliant on electricity to power medical equipment, but limited studies have evalu...