The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) announced they will jointly award the Harvard School of Public Health $7.8 million over the next five years to examine the effects of toxic mixed metals on children last week.

The initiative will establish the Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research and is the product of the largest environmental research grant ever awarded by the EPA in New England, according to an EPA press release.

Six other centers across the country received similar funding, but Harvard was the only new project to be funded in a competitive process, said EPA Environmental Research Program Manager Nigel Fields, who is the project officer for the planned children’s center.

In addition, Harvard beat out proposals from the University of Iowa and the University of Michigan to continue programs already in existence, said Professor of Occupational and Environmental Medicine Howard Hu, the principal investigator of the children’s center.

“We were impressed by their organization. We were impressed by their intellectual leadership,” Fields said. “We were also impressed by the tightness and integration of their research questions.”

Fields said that, in general, a center examines three or four distinct but interrelated areas of inquiry, whereas a grant will only fund one, smaller project. In addition, he said, a center’s work is anticipated to last years longer than an individual grant recipient’s work.

Fields said the difference between a grant and a center is like that between “an article as opposed to a magazine.”

Consequently, Fields said, centers receive more funding for longer periods of time than do grant projects. Centers are awarded less frequently are than grants, he added.

Fields said the EPA and NIEHS began to jointly fund children’s research centers in 1998. The goal of these centers is to address pressing local problems and also to create a national network of doctors and researchers who can communicate about environmental impacts on children, Fields said.

Harvard’s center will be one of the first projects ever to examine the effects of toxic mixed metals, Hu said.

“Until now, the great majority of studies that have looked at environmental factors have looked at single substances,” Hu said. “Toxicity to humans [of mixed metals] cannot be predicted by toxicity of individual substances.”

Fields said that the EPA was attracted by the project that looked at the effects of toxic mixed metals.

“It’s not something the EPA has done a lot of, but we are moving more and more towards studying cumulative impacts,” Fields said.

Hu said the children’s center will investigate the effects of mixed metals on children living at the Tar Creek Superfund in Oklahoma.

According to the EPA website, “A Superfund site is any land in the United States that has been contaminated by hazardous waste and identified by the [EPA] as a candidate for cleanup because it poses a risk to human health and/or the environment.”