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CHE Partner Maye Thompson, RN, PhD: Finding and Fighting Pollution in People
Activist, Oregon Environmental Council/ CHE Oregon
When the Oregon Environmental Council decided to do a small biomonitoring study of ten Oregon residents as a way of drawing attention to the issue of pollutants in peoples' bodies, the budget was too small to pay a lab technician to collect and prepare specimens.
"As the only nurse on the committee," said CHE Partner Maye Thompson, RN, PhD, in an email interview, "I was the obvious choice. So I had the pleasure of running around Oregon with specimen containers and coolers and a borrowed centrifuge."
She had been working with OEC/CHE Oregon for several years, assisting in their efforts to build bridges between the medical, public health, and environmental communities. Before that, she had volunteered with the Oregon Nurses Association, the Oregon Pesticide Education Network, and Health Care Without Harm.
The collection process stretched over four months. It required Thompson to follow multiple handling and shipping protocols, a different one for each of the three companies that would test the samples.
"It was nerve-wracking," she said. "I'm a clinic nurse - I'm used to handing stuff over to someone picking up lab stuff, and not thinking about it."
*** Thompson's nursing experience stretched back many years. As a child, she spent a lot of time in the hospital.
"I got to love the nurses who took care of me," she says. That wasn't her only reason for pursuing nursing as an occupation, though. "I became a nurse because I could do it anywhere, rural or urban, or overseas, full time or part time, with or without a lot of technology, and before or after nuclear apocalypse, which I worried a lot about in my teens and twenties."
During nursing school, she became fascinated by the cultural aspects of health and health care. So after graduating, she accepted a clinic job in a small town populated largely with Spanish-speaking agricultural workers in California's Central Valley.
"There were many kids and adults with asthma, with dermatological problems, with malnutrition," she recalled. "What was surprising, considering the level of pesticide and herbicide use in the area, was how few people we saw with acute poisoning from these chemicals." A medical assistant later explained to her that workers who thought the "plant medicine" had made them sick would wait to seek treatment for fear of getting fired.
Eventually Thompson left the Valley, but her concern for health care access and environmental causes of disease stayed with her. Now she is an activist and a self-described "not-often-at-home 'stay-at-home' mom."
Her goals in her volunteer work are to spread knowledge about environmental toxicants and strategize about how to use the Precautionary Principle in policy-making. To those ends, she follows a variety of related topics.
"I love CHE," she said, "because it has such wonderful resources, in plain English, for those who are passionate about specific issues and/or populations, and those who, like me, are generalists and want to track it all."
She recently set about to learn toxicology, which she felt she needed to understand complex environmental health issues. With three years of college chemistry and a "reasonable understanding" of epidemiology to begin from, she was able to "bootstrap" her knowledge.
"My husband gave me some pretty funny looks," she said, "when I started to bring basic toxo books to bed for some 'light reading.' He wanted to know if I was trying to tell him something."
*** In late 2007, the Oregon Environmental Council (OEC) released "Pollution in People", a report detailing the results of the biomonitoring. Not only had Thompson collected the specimens it was based on, she had also helped write it. Renee Hackenmiller-Paradis, Program Director for OEC, described Thompson's involvement as "instrumental."
When asked about the general response to the report, Hackenmiller-Paradis said it was "amazing" and ticked off a list of milestones. "We’ve distributed nearly 500 hard copies of the report, I’ve presented the findings to over 400 people around the state, when it was released it was covered by two TV news stations, and every major daily paper in the state ran an article—including a front page above-the-fold article in the Sunday Oregonian, Oregon’s biggest circulation newspaper. It has successfully started a broad conversation in the state about chemicals in products, how they impact our health, and the need for system changes."
It is those kinds of system changes that Thompson wants to help bring about. She feels inspired by "scientists who are willing to step out and express the potential policy implications of their work. My dream job would be to assist them or their institutions, in some way, from home, so we can move forward to make the world a safer place for kids and moms." Which would be a safer world for everyone.
By Shelby Gonzalez, CHE Administrative Coordinator
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