Associations between environmental quality and mortality in the contiguous United States 2000-2005

Age-adjusted mortality rates for the contiguous United States in 2000–2005 were obtained from the Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research system of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (2015). Age-adjusted mortality rates were weighted averages of the age-specific death rates, and they were used to account for different age structures among populations (Curtin and Klein 1995). The mortality rates for counties with < 10 deaths were suppressed by the CDC to protect privacy and to ensure data reliability; only counties with ≥ 10 deaths were included in the analyses. The underlying cause of mortality was specified using the World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (10th revision; ICD-10). In this study, we focused on the all-cause mortality rate (A00-R99) and on mortality rates from the three leading causes: heart disease (I00-I09, I11, I13, and I20-I51), cancer (C00-C97), and stroke (I60- I69) (Heron 2013). We excluded mortality due to external causes for all-cause mortality, as has been done in many previous studies (e.g., Pearce et al. 2010, 2011; Zanobetti and Schwartz 2009), because external causes of mortality are less likely to be related to environmental quality. We also focused on the contiguous United States because the numbers of counties with available cause-specific mortality rates were small in Hawaii and Alaska. County-level rates were available for 3,101 of the 3,109 counties in the contiguous United States (99.7%) for all-cause mortality; for 3,067 (98.6%) counties for heart disease mortality; for 3,057 (98.3%) counties for cancer mortality; and for 2,847 (91.6%) counties for stroke mortality. The EQI includes variables representing five environmental domains: air, water, land, built, and sociodemographic (2). The domain-specific indices include both beneficial and detrimental environmental factors. The air domain includes 87 variables representing criteria and hazardous air pollutants. The water domain includes 80 variables representing overall water quality, general water contamination, recreational water quality, drinking water quality, atmospheric deposition, drought, and chemical contamination. The land domain includes 26 variables representing agriculture, pesticides, contaminants, facilities, and radon. The built domain includes 14 variables representing roads, highway/road safety, public transit behavior, business environment, and subsidized housing environment. The sociodemographic environment includes 12 variables representing socioeconomics and crime. This dataset is not publicly accessible because: EPA cannot release personally identifiable information regarding living individuals, according to the Privacy Act and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This dataset contains information about human research subjects. Because there is potential to identify individual participants and disclose personal information, either alone or in combination with other datasets, individual level data are not appropriate to post for public access. Restricted access may be granted to authorized persons by contacting the party listed. It can be accessed through the following means: Human health data are not available publicly. EQI data are available at: https://edg.epa.gov/data/Public/ORD/NHEERL/EQI. Format: Data are stored as csv files. 

This dataset is associated with the following publication:
Jian, Y., L. Messer, J. Jagai, K. Rappazzo, C. Gray, S. Grabich, and D. Lobdell. Associations between environmental quality and mortality in the contiguous United States 2000-2005.   ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), Research Triangle Park, NC, USA, 125(3): 355-362, (2017).

Tags: air-quality, built-environment, environmental-quality, land-quality, sociodemographic-quality, water-quality
Organization: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency