Scholars@Duke
construction release_alert
Scholars@Duke will be undergoing maintenance on Wed., Feb. 4 from 5-6pm ET. Some site features like search and browse may not work during this time.
cancel
Matthew Stiegel

Matthew Stiegel

Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health
Family Medicine and Community Health, Occupational & Environmental
matthew.stiegel@duke.edu
Box 2738, Durham, NC 27710
2424 Erwin Road Suite 204, Box 2738, Durham, NC 27710

Selected Publications

Innovation in Personal Protective Equipment Decontamination During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Powered-Air Purifying Respirator Hood Optimal Decontaminant Distribution System

Journal Article Applied Biosafety · December 1, 2025 Background: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted critical shortages in personal protective equipment (PPE), particularly respirators, which limited healthcare workers’ safety worldwide. Decontamination and reuse of PPE, including powered-air purifying respira ... Full text Cite

Hand and Glove Sanitizing in Sterile Compounding, Part 1.

Journal Article International journal of pharmaceutical compounding · November 2024 Selecting an appropriate sanitizer (i.e., "rub") for application to hands and gloves before and, if necessary, during sterile compounding is as important as is its consistent and judicious use. Alcohols and chlorhexidine gluconate, which have long been rec ... Cite

Comparative analysis of sampling and detection methods for fungal contamination on common healthcare environment surface materials.

Journal Article Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol · May 21, 2024 We evaluated sampling and detection methods for fungal contamination on healthcare surface materials, comparing the efficacy of foam sponges, flocked swabs, and Replicate Organism Detection And Counting (RODAC) plates alongside culture-based quantification ... Full text Link to item Cite

A cluster of three extrapulmonary Mycobacterium abscessus infections linked to well-maintained water-based heater-cooler devices.

Journal Article Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol · May 2024 BACKGROUND: Various water-based heater-cooler devices (HCDs) have been implicated in nontuberculous mycobacteria outbreaks. Ongoing rigorous surveillance for healthcare-associated M. abscessus (HA-Mab) put in place following a prior institutional outbreak ... Full text Link to item Cite

Breath biomarkers and the exposome

Chapter · January 1, 2020 Biomarkers in human body fluids provide a window into the biochemistry and its interactions with the environment, defined as the “human exposome.” Understanding the exposome addresses the observation that an estimated 70%-90% of long-term latency and chron ... Full text Cite

Quality Control: Hand and Glove Sanitizing in Sterile Compounding, Part 2.

Journal Article International journal of pharmaceutical compounding · November 2019 Selecting an appropriate sanitizer (i.e., "rub") for application to hands and gloves before and, if necessary, during sterile compounding is as important as is its consistent and judicious use. Alcohols and chlorhexidine gluconate, which have long been rec ... Cite

Quality Control: Hand and Glove Sanitizing in Sterile Compounding, Part 1.

Journal Article International journal of pharmaceutical compounding · September 2019 In pharmaceutical compounding, strict adherence to a protocol for hand hygiene and glove sanitizing is essential to ensure the purity, safety, and effectiveness of sterile preparations; reduce patient morbidity and mortality; and decrease the cost of healt ... Cite

Detection and analysis of endogenous polar volatile organic compounds (PVOCs) in urine for human exposome research.

Journal Article Biomarkers : biochemical indicators of exposure, response, and susceptibility to chemicals · May 2019 Background: The human exposome, defined as '…everything that is not the genome', comprises all chemicals in the body interacting with life processes. The exposome drives genes x environment (GxE) interactions that can cause long-term latency ... Full text Cite

Predicting polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons using a mass fraction approach in a geostatistical framework across North Carolina.

Journal Article Journal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology · June 2018 Currently in the United States there are no regulatory standards for ambient concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a class of organic compounds with known carcinogenic species. As such, monitoring data are not routinely collected resul ... Full text Cite

Human biomarker interpretation: the importance of intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) and their calculations based on mixed models, ANOVA, and variance estimates.

Journal Article Journal of toxicology and environmental health. Part B, Critical reviews · January 2018 Human biomonitoring is the foundation of environmental toxicology, community public health evaluation, preclinical health effects assessments, pharmacological drug development and testing, and medical diagnostics. Within this framework, the intra-class cor ... Full text Cite

Standardization of the collection of exhaled breath condensate and exhaled breath aerosol using a feedback regulated sampling device.

Journal Article Journal of breath research · November 2017 Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) and associated exhaled breath aerosols (EBA) are valuable non-invasive biological media used for the quantification of biomarkers. EBC contains exhaled water vapor, soluble gas-phase (polar) organic compounds, ionic species, ... Full text Cite

Linking physiological parameters to perturbations in the human exposome: Environmental exposures modify blood pressure and lung function via inflammatory cytokine pathway.

Journal Article Journal of toxicology and environmental health. Part A · January 2017 Human biomonitoring is an indispensable tool for evaluating the systemic effects derived from external stressors including environmental pollutants, chemicals from consumer products, and pharmaceuticals. The aim of this study was to explore consequences of ... Full text Cite

Inflammatory Cytokines and White Blood Cell Counts Response to Environmental Levels of Diesel Exhaust and Ozone Inhalation Exposures.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2016 Epidemiological observations of urban inhalation exposures to diesel exhaust (DE) and ozone (O3) have shown pre-clinical cardiopulmonary responses in humans. Identifying the key biological mechanisms that initiate these health bioindicators is difficult du ... Full text Open Access Cite

Taxonomic applicability of inflammatory cytokines in adverse outcome pathway (AOP) development.

Journal Article Journal of toxicology and environmental health. Part A · January 2016 Cytokines, low-molecular-weight messenger proteins that act as intercellular immunomodulatory signals, have become a mainstream preclinical marker for assessing the systemic inflammatory response to external stressors. The challenge is to quantitate from h ... Full text Cite

Analysis of inflammatory cytokines in human blood, breath condensate, and urine using a multiplex immunoassay platform.

Journal Article Biomarkers : biochemical indicators of exposure, response, and susceptibility to chemicals · February 2015 A change in the expression of cytokines in human biological media indicates an inflammatory response to external stressors and reflects an early step along the adverse outcome pathway (AOP) for various health endpoints. To characterize and interpret this i ... Full text Cite

Corrigendum.

Journal Article Biomarkers : biochemical indicators of exposure, response, and susceptibility to chemicals · February 2015 Full text Cite

Kidney injury biomarkers and urinary creatinine variability in nominally healthy adults.

Journal Article Biomarkers : biochemical indicators of exposure, response, and susceptibility to chemicals · January 2015 Environmental exposure diagnostics use creatinine concentrations in urine aliquots as the internal standard for dilution normalization of all other excreted metabolites when urinary excretion rate data are not available. This is a reasonable approach for h ... Full text Cite

Volatile Organic Compounds Off-gassing from Firefighters' Personal Protective Equipment Ensembles after Use.

Journal Article Journal of occupational and environmental hygiene · January 2015 Firefighters' personal protective equipment (PPE) ensembles will become contaminated with various compounds during firefighting. Some of these compounds will off-gas following a response, which could result in inhalation exposure. This study was conducted ... Full text Cite

Exploratory breath analyses for assessing toxic dermal exposures of firefighters during suppression of structural burns.

Journal Article Journal of breath research · September 2014 Firefighters wear fireproof clothing and self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) during rescue and fire suppression activities to protect against acute effects from heat and toxic chemicals. Fire services are also concerned about long-term health outcome ... Full text Cite

Systemic exposure to PAHs and benzene in firefighters suppressing controlled structure fires.

Journal Article The Annals of occupational hygiene · August 2014 Turnout gear provides protection against dermal exposure to contaminants during firefighting; however, the level of protection is unknown. We explored the dermal contribution to the systemic dose of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and other aromati ... Full text Cite

Estimating common parameters of lognormally distributed environmental and biomonitoring data: harmonizing disparate statistics from publications.

Journal Article Journal of toxicology and environmental health. Part B, Critical reviews · January 2014 The progression of science is driven by the accumulation of knowledge and builds upon published work of others. Another important feature is to place current results into the context of previous observations. The published literature, however, often does n ... Full text Cite

Evolution of environmental exposure science: using breath-borne biomarkers for "discovery" of the human exposome.

Journal Article Analytical chemistry · November 2013 According to recent research, 70-90% of long-term latency and chronic human disease incidence is attributable to environmental (human exposome) factors through the gene-environment interaction. Environmental exposure science is now embarking on a new "disc ... Full text Cite

Post-operative elimination of sevoflurane anesthetic and hexafluoroisopropanol metabolite in exhaled breath: pharmacokinetic models for assessing liver function.

Journal Article Journal of breath research · September 2013 Sevoflurane (SEV), a commonly used anesthetic agent for invasive surgery, is directly eliminated via exhaled breath and indirectly by metabolic conversion to inorganic fluoride and hexafluoroisopropanol (HFIP), which is also eliminated in the breath. We st ... Full text Cite

Clinical breath analysis: discriminating between human endogenous compounds and exogenous (environmental) chemical confounders.

Journal Article Journal of breath research · March 2013 Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath originate from current or previous environmental exposures (exogenous compounds) and internal metabolic (anabolic and catabolic) production (endogenous compounds). The origins of certain VOCs in breath pr ... Full text Cite

CONTROLLED EXPOSURES OF HUMAN VOLUNTEERS TO DIESEL ENGINE EXHAUST: BIOMARKERS OF EXPOSURE AND HEALTH OUTCOMES

Conference JOURNAL OF AEROSOL MEDICINE AND PULMONARY DRUG DELIVERY · 2013 Cite

Assessing spatial and temporal variability of VOCs and PM-components in outdoor air during the Detroit Exposure and Aerosol Research Study (DEARS)

Journal Article Atmospheric Environment · December 1, 2012 Exposure models for air pollutants often adjust for effects of the physical environment (e.g., season, urban vs. rural populations) in order to improve exposure and risk predictions. Yet attempts are seldom made to attribute variability in observed outdoor ... Full text Cite

Breath analysis science at PittCon 2012, Orlando, Florida.

Journal Article Journal of breath research · September 2012 Full text Cite

Breath biomarkers in environmental health science: exploring patterns in the human exposome.

Journal Article Journal of breath research · December 2011 The human genome is the counterpart to the human exposome with respect to the gene × environment interaction that describes health state and outcome. The genome has already been sequenced and is in the process of being assessed for specific functionality; ... Full text Cite

Observing the human exposome as reflected in breath biomarkers: heat map data interpretation for environmental and intelligence research.

Journal Article Journal of breath research · September 2011 Over the past decade, the research of human system biology and the interactions with the external environment has permeated all phases of environmental, medical and public health research. Similar to the fields of genomics and proteomics research, the adve ... Full text Cite

Heat map visualization of complex environmental and biomarker measurements.

Journal Article Chemosphere · July 2011 Over the past decade, the assessment of human systems interactions with the environment has permeated all phases of environmental and public health research. We are invoking lessons learned from the broad discipline of Systems Biology research that focuses ... Full text Cite

Cumulative exposure assessment for trace-level polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) using human blood and plasma analysis.

Journal Article Journal of chromatography. B, Analytical technologies in the biomedical and life sciences · July 2010 Humans experience chronic cumulative trace-level exposure to mixtures of volatile, semi-volatile, and non-volatile polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) present in the environment as by-products of combustion processes. Certain PAHs are known or suspecte ... Full text Cite