CDC Links Data on Health and Environment
Authors: Bridget M. Kuehn
Journal: JAMA (2009)

EPIDEMIOLOGICAL SURVEILLANCE designed to assess the relationship between environmental exposures and disease can take weeks, months, or even years to complete. Now, however, a new tool launched in July by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) might help scientists, clinicians, and citizens complete some environmental public health queries in a matter of minutes. This Web-based tool, the CDC’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Network, allows individuals for the first time to query data from an array of federal, state, and localdatabases that trackhealth conditions or environmental exposures. It is freely available for use by anyone at the program’s Web site, http: //www.cdc.gov/ephtracking, which also serves as a clearinghouse for environmental health information. Despite the growing availability of tools and technologies to identify the genetic contributions to chronic diseases, there are insufficient resources to effectively track the contributions of environmental factors to such diseases. For example, although evidence that rates of health conditions such as autoimmune and developmental disorders are increasing, being able to identify environmental components has been hindered because states have not consistently tracked such disorders. Moreover, even when diseases or potentially disease-causing environmental exposures are tracked, the data are kept in a patchwork of state, local, and federal databases. The US Congress in 2002 appropriated funds for the CDC to strengthen local and state environmental health tracking programs and to create a nationwide surveillance tool as well, said Judy Qualters, MPH, PhD, chief of the CDC’s environmental health tracking branch. The resulting tool brings together various types of state-level data, such as data on hospitalization for such conditions as asthma and cardiac arrest, on emergency department visits for such conditions as carbon monoxide poisoning, and on air quality, air pollution, and water contamination with such substances as arsenic and nitrates. Additionally, it includes data from national surveillance programs such as the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, water quality data collected by US Geological Survey, and cancer registry data collected by the National Cancer Institute and the CDC. Qualters said data on birth defects and other reproductive outcomes will be added this fall and that she expects it to continue to grow and evolve. Someoftheparticipatingstatesalready have put data derived from the network to use. For example, Maine and Florida have tracked data on carbon monoxide poisoningintheirstatesandusedit todevelop and target prevention campaigns. In Utah, within a day of receiving a call from a resident who was concerned that aparticularneighborhoodmighthavean unusually high rate of cancer, health officials using the system found data that the neighborhood’s rate was no higher than that of the state as a whole. Using the network, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health found that exposure to mold or moisture in schools was associated with higher rates of asthma and that the greater the exposure the higher the risk, said Suzanne K. Condon, MSM, director of the department’s Bureau of Environmental Health. Armed with this information, the department immediately began working with school and local health officials to mitigate mold and moisture problems in schools. The development of this program and similar ones at state and local levels marks a major advance for the field of public health, said Condon. Such programs will help identify public health threats more rapidly and allow better targeting of resources to solve the most urgent concerns, she said. “It really advances the field of environmental health in way we have not seen since its inception in the public health world,” Condon said.