The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) has been continuously biomonitoring Americans’ exposure to two families of harmful environmental chemicals: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). However, biomonitoring these chemicals is expensive. To save cost, in 2005, NHANES resorted to pooled biomonitoring; i.e., amalgamating individual specimens to form a pool and measuring chemical levels from pools. Despite being publicly available, these pooled data gain limited applications in health studies. Among the few studies using these data, racial/age disparities were detected, but there is no control for confounding effects. These disadvantages are due to the complexity of pooled measurements and a dearth of statistical tools. Herein, we developed a regression-based method to unzip pooled measurements, which facilitated a comprehensive assessment of disparities in exposure to these chemicals. We found increasing dependence of PCBs on age and income, whereas PBDEs were the highest among adolescents and seniors and were elevated among the low-income population. In addition, Hispanics had the lowest PCBs and PBDEs among all demographic groups after controlling for potential confounders. These findings can guide the development of population-specific interventions to promote environmental justice. Moreover, both chemical levels declined throughout the period, indicating the effectiveness of existing regulatory policies.

Since 2009, the Chinese state-owned corporation SINLANX has been managing the Anjava Sugar Plantation, previously managed by French, Malagasy, and Mauritian companies, in northern Madagascar. Built upon the infrastructure constructed by the French colonial regime and operating based on a collaboration agreement between SINLANX and the Malagasy state-owned sugar company, Anjava presents a telling story of spatialized acts of survival and racialized conflicts over land and water in the interstitial spaces between capitalist production and subsistence economy. Malagasy villagers’ access to resources is often squeezed by multiple enclosures: a water-delivery system and a land-distribution system that prioritize sugar production and a bureaucratic system that punishes those who transgress the enclosures. Although Anjava villagers take advantage of the rhythm of sugar harvests and the nature of fire to sabotage sugar production or to make water claims for their livelihood, the agrarian and infrastructural arrangements at Anjava have perpetuated conditions of chronic precarity and profound marginalization of a landless population. The struggles at Anjava must be contextualized in the complex and ambiguous spaces between capital and labor, livelihood and resistance, dominance and adaptation, and ethnic collaboration and hostility.