Most public health surveillance systems in the United States do not capture individual-level measures of socioeconomic position. Without this information, socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes can be hidden. However, US Census data can be used to describe neighborhood-level socioeconomic conditions like poverty and crowding. Place matters. Neighborhood affects health independently of personal characteristics. Thus, important trends may be elucidated by linking geocoded public health surveillance data to area-based measures of socioeconomic position, such as the percentage of residents with incomes below the federal poverty level.
Objective
The panel will describe applying the methods of Harvard’s Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project to a diverse collection of infectious disease surveillance data from 14 US states and New York City. This session will demonstrate the feasibility and utility of using US Census data to reveal sub-populations vulnerable to infectious diseases.