LIBERTY, NY — A study just published in a scholarly health journal included significant participation from the Sullivan County Department of Public Health.

 Deputy public health director Jill Hubert-Simon “and epidemiologist Haley Motola have been working on this multi-phase study for years, so it’s especially gratifying to see a portion of that study published in Heliyon, a peer-reviewed health journal,” Hubert-Simon said.

Motola and Hubert-Simon contributed to the writing and editing of the article.

“We hope it furthers discussion about conducting more research in rural communities like Sullivan County, which have unique and often more significant health challenges than urban and suburban areas,” added Motola, who noted that this is the seventh scholarly article published to date regarding the larger NYU School of Medicine study looking at the county’s diabetes rate.

For this particular portion of the study, Motola and Hubert-Simon coordinated the collection of urine samples from over 300 local residents between November 2022 and September 2023 to determine:

If such sample collection was feasible and accurate in a rural area, given that it relied mostly on participants to collect, freeze and ship their samples to the lab; and

If elevated levels of bisphenol, an endocrine disruptor linked to diabetes, could be detected.

Of the 304 enrolled study participants, 296 mailed back the remote urine sample collection kits—a 97.4 percent return rate. 

Average bisphenol levels, while not significantly elevated, were two to three times higher in remotely sampled collections than initial samples obtained in person by the public health department (this could be due to daily diet variations, as bisphenol is found in canned food packaging).

“Our findings for the feasibility of remote biospecimen collection,” wrote the authors of the journal article, “could be invaluable as we continue to leverage new approaches to reach rural settings remotely and conduct high-quality rural health research.”

To read the article, visit www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(26)00117-9.

Six other articles have been published about the overall study in the last two years. They can be found at

www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/HALEY-L-MOTOLA-2316618079