Integrating research, surveillance, and practice in environmental public health tracking.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is working with selected state and local health departments, academic centers, and others to develop an environmental public health tracking initiative to improve geographic and temporal surveillance of environmental hazards, exposures, and related health outcomes. The objective is to support policy strategies and interventions for disease prevention by communities and environmental health agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. The first 3 years of the initiative focused on supporting states and cities in developing capacity, information technology infrastructure, and pilot projects to demonstrate electronic linkage of environmental hazard or exposure data and disease data. The next phase requires implementation across states. This transition could provide opportunities to further integrate research, surveillance, and practice through attention to four areas. The first is to develop a shared and transparent knowledge base that draws on environmental health research and substantiates decisions about what to track and the interpretation of results. The second is to identify and address information needs of policy and stakeholder audiences in environmental health. The third is to adopt mechanisms for coordination, decision making, and governance that can incorporate and support the major entities involved. The fourth is to promote disease prevention by systematically identifying and addressing population-level environmental determinants of health and disease

Environmental Public Health Awaits Rediscovery

Preventing environmental exposures that threaten human health remains among the best but least attended to opportunities to improve everyone’s health. For more than a decade, medical care concerns, exacerbated by voracious competition among medical empires and the implacably growing number of uninsured, have often been misconstrued as constituting a complete agenda for health system reform. The authors explain the predicament from an historical perspective — how defining events moved U.S. health policy away from protecting the public against dangerous exposures toward unrealistic expectations that doctors will fix whatever goes wrong, at least for individuals with ample medical insurance. They explain how environmentally oriented public health is uniquely suited to help organized medical care with its biggest headache: how to restrain expenditures while producing health. The authors provide specific examples of what has been lost and a prescription for how the U.S. could become the first among nations to strategically link public health and increasingly organized medical care to improve population health

Environmental public health tracking program: closing America's environmental public health gap, 2003

"Environmental public health tracking is the ongoing collection, integration, analysis, and interpretation of data about environmental hazards, exposure to environ mental hazards, and human health effects potentially related to exposure to environmental hazards. It includes dissemination of information learned from these data. The mission of environmental public health tracking_is to improve the health of communities. Using infor- mation from an environmental public health tracking network, federal, state, and local agencies will be better prepared to develop and evaluate effective public health actions to prevent or control chronic and acute diseases that can be linked to hazards in the environment. Health- care providers can provide better care and targeted preventive services. In addition, the public will have a better understanding of what is occurring in their communities and what actions they may take to protect or improve their health. CDC's goal is to develop a national network that will (1) be standards-based; (2) allow direct electronic data reporting and linkage within and across health effect, exposure, and hazard data; and (3) interoperate with other public health systems." - p. 1Caption title."March 2003"--p. 4."NCEH Pub No. 03-0051"--p. 4

Water-related environmental public health

Environmental conditions greatly influence the relation between water and human health. Challenges to the healthfulness of U.S. water include (1) pathogens resistant to standard water treatment methods, (2) chemical and biological contaminants, (3) aging or inadequate water system infrastructure, and (4) emergency- or disaster-related events. During 1999\u20132000, 25 states reported 39 drinking water-related outbreaks that caused 2,068 cases of illnesses and 2 deaths. Of the 22 outbreaks for which a cause was identified, 20 were associated with pathogens (parasites, bacteria, or viruses) and 2 were associated with chemical poisonings (nitrate and sodium hydroxide) (MMWR November 22, 2002;51[SS08]:1\u201328). There are concerns that some substances in water, such as disinfection byproducts and toxins released by marine algae, are associated with health effects.factsheet.pdf200

Diesel Buses, Oil Prices and Premature Deaths from Particulate Matter: Understanding the Connections, Exploring Solutions

In 2000 the Environmental and Energy Study Institute hosted a briefing to discuss the complex issues surrounding diesel buses and alternative-fuel buses. In particular, the panelists addressed the environmental, public health, and economic costs associated with diesel bus emissions and discussed both the costs and benefits of alternative-fuel buses

Can Lessons from Public Health Disease Surveillance Be Applied to Environmental Public Health Tracking?

Disease surveillance has a century-long tradition in public health, and environmental data have been collected at a national level by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for several decades. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced an initiative to develop a national environmental public health tracking (EPHT) network with “linkage” of existing environmental and chronic disease data as a central goal. On the basis of experience with long-established disease surveillance systems, in this article we suggest how a system capable of linking routinely collected disease and exposure data should be developed, but caution that formal linkage of data is not the only approach required for an effective EPHT program. The primary operational goal of EPHT has to be the “treatment” of the environment to prevent and/or reduce exposures and minimize population risk for developing chronic diseases. Chronic, multifactorial diseases do not lend themselves to data-driven evaluations of intervention strategies, time trends, exposure patterns, or identification of at-risk populations based only on routinely collected surveillance data. Thus, EPHT should be synonymous with a dynamic process requiring regular system updates to a) incorporate new technologies to improve population-level exposure and disease assessment, b) allow public dissemination of new data that become available, c) allow the policy community to address new and emerging exposures and disease “threads,” and d) evaluate the effectiveness of EPHT over some appropriate time interval. It will be necessary to weigh the benefits of surveillance against its costs, but the major challenge will be to maintain support for this important new system

Electric Buses for the NFTA

This brief discusses many reasons that the NFTA should invest in using electric buses. After explaining the differences in bus technologies, it details numerous environmental, public health, and economic benefits of electric buses. The brief closes with case studies to show how other cities and counties across the world are beginning to use electric buses

National Environmental Public Health Tracking history

This page contains information about and historical documents from the early years of the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program.20181166

Environmental Public Health Tracking Network vision

Version 1.0, 10/20/2004This document provides a vision for the Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) Network. The document is designed to 1) describe, at a conceptual level, the function and purpose of the EPHT Network, 2) provide a profile of the stakeholders and users of the Network, and 3) outline the major features of the EPHT Network.Linking environmental and public health systems is currently very complex and time-consuming due to a lack of coordination, communication, and standards. The EPHT Program has been established to address the issues of environmental public health tracking. The EPHT Network will make data and tools available to support the EPHT Program and other public health and environmental health programs. It will be a distributed, secure, web-based network that will provide access to environmental and health data that are collected by a wide variety of agencies. The Network will comprise of individual state networks and a national network, and will comply with Public Health Information Network (PHIN) standards and be able to exchange data with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Exchange Network, where applicable. It will also implement a common data \ue2\u20ac\u153vocabulary\ue2\u20ac? for environmental public health tracking to improve collaboration and allow direct electronic data sharing. The EPHT Network will provide access to environmental, health, and linked environmental-health data from both centralized and de- centralized data stores and repositories, and it will support data exchanges and data linkages at local, state, regional, and national levels.This document has been developed by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) under a contract with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention \ue2\u20ac\u201c Department of Health and Human Services.netvision.pd