Wall Patrick

In 2002, the United States (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program (Tracking Program) to address the challenges in environmental health surveillance described by the Pew Environmental Commission (1). The report cited gaps in our understanding of how the environment affects our health and attributed these gaps to a dearth of surveillance data for environmental hazards, human exposures, and health effects. The Tracking Program's mission is to provide information from a nationwide network of integrated health and environmental data that drives actions to improve the health of communities. Accomplishing this mission requires a range of expertise from environmental health scientists to programmers to communicators employing the best practices and latest technical advances of their disciplines. Critical to this mission, the Tracking Program must identify and prioritize what data are needed, address any gaps found, and integrate the data into the network for ongoing surveillance.

Objective: To increase the availability and accessibility of standardized environmental health data for public health surveillance and decision-making.

Understanding how exposure to hazards in our environment (air, water, food and surroundings) affects our health is critical to understanding causes of many chronic and acute diseases and to planning and implementing appropriate response and prevention efforts. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) established the congressionally mandated National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program (Tracking Program) to facilitate the analysis and interpretation of both environmental and health outcome data through the building of a national tracking network which integrates data from environmental hazard monitoring, human exposure and health effects surveillance. This network of standardized electronic data provides valid scientific information on environmental exposures and adverse health conditions in a practical format to explore plausible spatial and temporal relations between these factors. The program funds and provides guidance to 24 state and local health departments to develop local tracking networks that feed data into the National Tracking Network, enabling enhanced public health actions.

Objective

The National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program facilitates the linkage of environmental information to health outcomes through development of a national standards-based public health surveillance system that provides useful information to help improve where we live and work. The purpose of this summary is to report how state tracking programs have used their tracking networks to save lives and protect people from health threats.