State and federal environmental health officials said that current budgets allow them to collect or use such data in less than half the cases where they thought it to be necessary. Even when laboratories have the capacity to collect the data, no laboratory method has been developed for assessing exposure levels in human tissue for many of the 1,400 chemicals known to pose a threat to human health, the report said. Public health officials said that, to put local data into context, they need more information on typical exposures in the general population. We must provide the resources that will enable federal and state officials to address these barriers. Breast cancer will be diagnosed in about 180,000 women this year, and prostate cancer will be diagnosed in about the same number of men, according to the American Cancer Society.
Some medical researchers suspect environmental factors have contributed to the high numbers.
Data on how environmental toxins affect children are particularly lacking, according to physicians and public health officials who testified at Tuesday's hearing before the labor, health and human services and education subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. Cases of lead poisoning among children are on the decline, Jackson said, and the CDC hopes to eradicate them completely by 2010. However, childhood asthma is on the increase. In the last two decades, the number of asthmatic children has doubled to about 4 million, and officials are unsure why the number of cases is on the rise. In addition, only 10 states have a surveillance system in place to monitor birth defects, Jackson said, and data on autistic children are only being collected in the city of Atlanta.