Mary B Collins

SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry | SUNY-ESF · Department of Environmental Studies

Background: The effective reproduction number (Rt) is a dynamic indicator of current disease spread risk. Wastewater measurements of viral concentrations are known to correlate with clinical measures of diseases and have been incorporated into methods for estimating the Rt. Methods: We review wastewater-based methods to estimate the Rt for SARS-CoV...

Background The public health response to COVID-19 has shifted to reducing deaths and hospitalizations to prevent overwhelming health systems. The amount of SARS-CoV-2 RNA fragments in wastewater are known to correlate with clinical data including cases and hospital admissions for COVID-19. We developed and tested a predictive model for incident COV...

COVID-19 saw the expansion of public health tools to manage the pandemic. One tool that saw extensive use was the public health dashboard, web-based visualization tools that communicate information to users in easy-to-read graphics. Dashboards were widely used prior to the pandemic, but COVID-19 saw expanded use and development. To date, dashboards...

COVID-19 saw the expansion of public health communication tools to manage and inform the pandemic as it evolved. While the utility of these tools is important in and of itself, it was also the case that during this time experts honed the effectiveness in a near real-time fashion. One tool that saw extensive use was the public health dashboard, web-...

Air pollution is a serious public health issue with early childhood exposure being of high concern because of the greater risk that children might experience negative health outcomes. Industrial sources in and near communities are one potential path of exposure that children might face with greater levels of air pollution correlating with higher le...

Analyzing the relationship between employment and toxic emissions at over 25,000 US manufacturing facilities between 1998 and 2012 demonstrates that significant reductions in toxic pollution can be achieved without causing equivalent reductions in employment. Three simulations provide a comparison of the combined effects on toxic releases and emplo...

Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to be a valuable source of information regarding SARS-CoV-2 transmission and COVID-19 cases. Though the method has been used for several decades to track other infectious diseases, there has not been a comprehensive review outlining all of the pathogens that have been surveilled through wastewate...

Pollutant chemical releases and their toxicological profiles have been investigated by many researchers in the past; however, little work of this kind has been conducted in the Upstate New York area. The objectives of this study were to compare the pollutant releases from Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) facilities in Upstate New York, both by quantit...

Public procurement is a large sector of the economy with most procurement going to the defense sector. Procurement by the defense sector includes purchases made through contracts to private businesses that manufacture durable goods. Manufacturing of these goods results in pollution production with toxic wastes being among the most dangerous polluta...

Infectious disease surveillance is vitally important to maintaining health security, but these efforts are challenged by the pace at which new pathogens emerge. Wastewater surveillance can rapidly obtain population-level estimates of disease transmission, and we leverage freedom from disease principles to make use of nondetection of SARS-CoV-2 in w...

In 2003, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation began designating Potential Environmental Justice Areas (PEJA) for the purpose of providing public participation opportunities to disadvantaged communities during permitting deliberations. We developed NYenviroScreen to help stakeholders understand, review, and provide input for h...

Response to the COVID-19 pandemic saw an unprecedented uptake in bottom-up efforts to incorporate community wastewater testing to inform public health. While not a new strategy, various specialized scientific advancements were achieved to establish links between wastewater concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 and public health outcomes. To maximize public...

There is reason to believe that hazardous emissions generated by industrial actors that have been awarded government contracts have different pollution prevention action patterns compared to those that have not been awarded government contracts. This is important because pollution prevention actions are a key inroad to alleviating environmental con...

Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 has shown to be a valuable source of information regarding SARS-CoV-2 transmission and COVID-19 cases. Though the method has been used for several decades to track other infectious diseases, there has not been a comprehensive review outlining all of the pathogens surveilled through wastewater. The aim of this s...

Infectious disease surveillance is vitally important to maintaining health security, but these efforts are challenged by the pace at which new pathogens emerge. Wastewater surveillance can rapidly obtain population-level estimates of disease transmission, and we leverage freedom from disease principles to make use of non-detection of SARS-CoV-2 in...

Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 RNA is increasingly being incorporated into public health efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to obtain the maximum benefit from these efforts, approaches to wastewater monitoring need to be rapid, sensitive, and relatable to relevant epidemiological parameters. In this study, we present an ul...

Background Exposure to air pollution has been linked to individual health effects in occupational environments and communities proximate to air pollution sources. Use of estimated chemical concentrations from the Risk Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI) model, derived from the Toxics Release Inventory, can help approximate some contributions...

There is a large body of literature showing that minorities and people living in low-income households live disproportionately close to polluting industrial facilities across the United States. However, only limited work of this nature has been conducted in Upstate New York. In this study, we utilized hierarchical clustering to create seven residen...

Wastewater entering sewer networks represents a unique source of pooled epidemiological information. In this study, we coupled online solid-phase extraction with liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry to achieve high-throughput analysis of health and lifestyle-related substances in untreated municipal wastewater during the coronavi...

To date, COVID-19 has claimed more than 100 000 American lives. Early inquiry suggests preexisting conditions are key risk factors contributing to COVID-19 mortality and air pollution exposure could exacerbate this relationship. Building on prior research linking deaths from respiratory viruses to air pollution exposures, we investigate how 2014 Na...

The relationship between economic activity and environmental pollution is a topic of extensive research. Although a proportional relationship between the two is often the default assumption, emerging scholarship suggests that polluting releases are disproportionally distributed across units of production. This paper examines if proportionality or d...

Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 has become an attractive tool for combating the spread of COVID-19 by assessing the presence or levels of the virus shed in a population. However, the methods to quantify viral RNA and to link those quantities to the level of infection within the community vary. In this study, we sought to identify and optimize...

Point source emissions generated by facilities that have been awarded government contracts raise questions regarding the relationship between the State and industrial facilities, particularly when those facilities’ emissions are disproportionately high. While providing public goods or services, many facilities also produce harmful emissions and tox...

Social-ecological-systems (SES) scholars have called for increased elaboration of the social dimensions of natural systems. Although a strong body of research explaining adaptive or maladaptive resource use exists, the integration of knowledge related to values, perceptions, and behaviors is less developed. Perceptions are particularly useful when...

Environmental disproportionality research shows extreme differences in the production of environmental harm by what would seem to be similar producers. Although researchers have studied disproportionality among individual facilities in a given place or within a given industry, few assess such patterns at the corporate level. We conduct a disproport...

Point source pollution from industrial activity is a significant environmental problem that unequally impacts people. In addition to disparate impacts on people, the environment is also unequally impacted. Environmental justice is one body of scholarship that studies this problem but almost exclusively from the social side. The question we are stri...

Guidotti’s book, Health and sustainability: an introduction, undertakes the tall task of distilling the interconnections between sustainable progress and human health into a usable framework for those interested in the generation of actionable science. At the core, Guidotti is interested in how to reconcile conflicts between economic development an...

Several key studies have found that a small minority of producers, polluting at levels far exceeding group averages, generate the majority of overall exposure to industrial toxics. Frequently, such patterns go unnoticed and are understudied outside of the academic community. To our knowledge, no research to date has systematically described the sco...

This chapter examines how the dual role of the federal government in promoting and regulating promising new industrial technologies may evolve to embody an inherent conflict of interest, a condition referred to as the "paradox of partnerships." Using a temporal perspective to explore relevant paradoxes of partnerships, this research speculates on t...

This was the last manuscript Dr. William Freudenburg and I collaborated on prior to his passing on December 28, 2010. "Bill," as friends and colleagues called him, was unable to complete the requested manuscript revisions with me; consequently, I have made revisions to the original piece without the benefit of his scholarly perspectives and interpr...

I assessed the distribution of relative health risk from industrial air pollution in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the extent to which risk was disproportionately attributable to a minority of facilities. I spatially linked data on airborne emissions, health risk, and sociodemographics by census tract, coupling disproportionality measurements from 2 pe...

Providing for the long term care of and access to archaeological collections is a multifaceted area of concern. One particularly problematic class of collections are those materials resulting from research projects on federal lands conducted before long-term curation concerns were given much consideration. These collections may have enormous resear...