Episode 65: Water and Housing Instability
“Something that I have in mind when I think about radical hospitality–to treat those who often feel invisible with an extraordinary level of respect, to open the opportunity to feel clean again
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“As far as interventions go, we need a cultural shift in people’s minds about our unhoused population. We do have a human right to water, sanitation, and hygiene in California and these people also deserve continuous access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene.
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A conversation with Drs. Alhelí Calderón Villareal (California State University San Marcos) and Georgia Kayser (University of California, San Diego) about the importance of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services for people experiencing housing instability. Released December 20, 2024.
guests on the show
Alhelí Calderón Villareal
Alhelí is a Medical Doctor who graduated from the Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila (UA de C), a Master on Public Health graduated from the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública (INSP) in Mexico, and finished her PhD at the Joint Doctoral Program of Public Health - Global Health track at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the San Diego State University (SDSU). She is a co-director of Women in Global Health - Mexico Chapter, and Correspondent for Mexico in Pandemic Period Collective. Alhelí is also founder and director of the Social-Environmental Tijuana River Project. She has special training on global health, social and behavioral science and migration.
Dr. Calderón Villarreal has experience conducting research about Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) in several vulnerable populations during her master’s and doctoral studies. Dr. Calderón Villarreal founded and directed a transdisciplinary research group focused on the binational Tijuana River, studying water quality, and the water use, contact, and health outcomes among PWID who live inside this river. This project established her interest among the community of Person Who Inject Drugs (PWID). The results of this research study were published manuscript titled Deported, Homeless, and Into the Canal: Environmental Structural Violence in the Binational Tijuana River, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine in 2022, and were presented at the talk Structural Violence on the US-Mexico Border: Intersecting Forced Migration, Overdose, Water, and Human Rights Crises, presented with Dr. Joseph Friedman at the UCLA CTSI Distinguished Speaker Series 2022-2023.
Georgia Kayser
Georgia Kayser, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Global and Environmental Health in the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Deputy Director of the UC Global Health Institute Center for Planetary Health. Her environmental health research focuses on adolescent and children’s environmental health, water quality, environmental determinants of risk, and environmental health inequities and disparities. In her research she has explored the factors that limit access to safe and sustainable drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) services, globally; identified environmental determinants of risk, including pesticide and microbiological contaminants in drinking water; and examined environmental health disparities that result from gender, racial/ethnic, and geographic inequities. This research informs environmental health programs and policy. Her methodological expertise is in the use of cross-sectional studies to explore WaSH risk factors for disease across countries, formative research to identify interventions, experimental and quasi-experimental methods to test specific interventions, and geospatial analysis to understand patterns of exposure. She has conducted research in over 20 countries across the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia with funding from government, international organization, and private sector sources.
Dr. Kayser is currently working on a NIEHS funded K01 career award that explores pesticide exposures, mental health and endocrine disruption among children growing up near pesticide spray sites in Ecuador. She is also working on a NIDA funded study of WaSH access among people who inject drugs, many of whom are unhoused, and live on the US-Mexico border between Tijuana, and San Diego. Dr. Kayser enjoys mentoring students in her research and teaching environmental and global health courses at UCSD.