The Lifeline Group :: Tribal Software

EPA Tribal LifeLine Project Update

Background
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Tribal LifeLine Project was initiated so that the unique diets and activities of communities living traditional lifestyles are accurately reflected when making decisions that affect the health of the communities. The primary objective of the project is to create a suite of models that enhance the existing LifeLine™ Exposure and Risk Assessment Software, currently used by EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs for the registration of pesticides. The tools created by the Tribal LifeLine Project are being developed not only to provide regulators with the ability to better characterize exposure and risk for focused populations, but also to build capacity within communities for informed decision-making about health and environmental concerns. The software will be valuable for use with any focused population (e.g., farm workers, sports fishers, and coastal communities with high fish consumption), although the impetus for the project was Tribes. Alaska Native communities are the current focus of the project due to the prevalence of subsistence-based diets, the incidence of high cancer rates, and the presence of abandoned military waste sites and open dump sites. Efforts involving Tribes in the lower 48 states are planned, as well.

Prior to 2002, exposure and risk assessment software such as LifeLine™ focused primarily on the general U.S. population as described in conventional databases such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Continuing Survey of Food Intakes for Individuals (CSFII), or the National Human Activity Pattern Survey. Both the software and the databases often do not represent Tribal communities following traditional lifestyles that: have dietary habits and activities such as hunting, fishing and gathering; work with traditional materials in making artisan goods; and that have entire communities move on a seasonal basis.

As a result, EPA’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) began working with The LifeLine Group™, a nonprofit organization, to make software improvements. The existing LifeLine™ Software is a probabilistic exposure and risk assessment modeling tool, already peer reviewed and in use by EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs and elsewhere internationally. The fundamental approach for the model, which remains the same for all versions, is to describe individuals in a population (in terms of diet, activity, physiology, housing, etc.) in order to characterize opportunities for exposure.

OPPTS continues to seek input from groups such as EPA’s Science Policy Council Steering Committee, and EPA’s Committee for Regulatory Environmental Modeling throughout the development of the software. In addition, OPPTS has been actively collaborating with various groups, both internal and external to the Agency, including: Tribal communities and organizations, First Nations and Inuit Health Branch in Health Canada, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Smithsonian Institute, Canadian Conservation Institute, EPA’s Office of Research and Development, EPA Regions, among others.

Status
EPA announces the completion and release of two new tools for incorporating unique diets into exposure and risk assessments, AND the Compendium of Alaska Subsistence and Traditional Dietary Files

LifeLine Dietary Record Generator™
A key component of the Tribal LifeLine Project, a stand-alone product called the Dietary Record Generator™ (DRG), is an auxiliary tool that arose from a need to capture existing dietary information specific to Tribal communities which was not in a format that could be used by current exposure and risk assessment models. The DRG™ can capture information about food and dietary habits from a wide array of sources – including traditional knowledge - and transform it into a comprehensive database of simulated dietary intake files. The resulting databases can then be used as if they were generated from a conventional survey such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Continuing Survey of Food Intakes for Individuals (CSFII). The DRG™ provides the opportunity to upgrade or amend existing dietary databases as better information becomes available, or as food availability and habits change. The DRG™ also allows the use of dietary information relevant to unique population groups – not just Tribal communities (e.g., ethnic diets, vegetarian diets, diets high in any specific food of interest). The DRG™ files can then be imported into the LifeLine Customized Dietary Assessment Software™ (CDAS) for exposure and risk assessment purposes.

LifeLine Customized Dietary Assessment Software™
To understand the meaning of contaminant residues, there must be a way to link information about the residues to the possible health risks to individuals in a community. The new tools developed as part of the Tribal LifeLine Project can assist decision makers in EPA and the community to determine whether the residues pose unacceptable risks.

The LifeLine Customized Dietary Assessment Software™ (CDAS) calculates exposure and risk from chemicals in the diet, and can address the fundamental components of a dietary risk assessment:

Who may be at risk if a contaminant is found in water or foods in that community
What foods and dietary profiles make significant contributions to that risk
The impact of risk reduction strategies on those risk profiles
Where more data and additional research could provide meaningful improvements and confidence in the risk assessment

Compendium of Alaska Subsistence and Traditional Dietary Files
The Compendium is a collection of five distinct dietary profiles seen in Alaska (corresponding to the five ecological cultural zones as defined by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG)), and captured through use of the Dietary Record Generator™ software. The profiles represent the unique diets of Alaska Native populations consuming traditional and subsistence foods. The five major ecological cultural zones were determined based on rigorous statistical analysis, and include:

Arctic-Subarctic Coast/Yupik-Inupiaq
Aleutian Pacific/Auet-Alutiiq
Subarctic Interior/Athabaskan
Southeast Alaska Coast/Tlingit-Haida
Urban-Urban Periphery

While the ADFG ecological cultural zones were chosen to best represent Alaska for the purposes of this project, a user is able to define additional ecological cultural zones of interest, take specific dietary information from that zone, and use the Dietary Record Generator™ software and The LifeLine Customized Dietary Assessment Software™ to conduct a dietary risk assessment.

Next Steps
Currently, the LifeLine tools are being expanded to take into account the other routes and sources of exposure to possible environmental contaminants in indoor and outdoor air, building and residential materials, on pets and livestock, and in the natural materials used by artisans to weave baskets, make pottery, among others.