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Air Quality

Description

Under a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the DC DOH established the Environmental Public Health Tracking Program (EPHTP) to monitor specific environmental and public health indicators and to investigate any potential links for the purpose of guiding policy development, resource allocation, and decision-making on disease prevention and treatment activities. This information improves understanding of the immediate and short-term effects of airborne pollutants on health care usage. In a collaborative project between JHU/APL and DC DOH, investigators explored and quantified correlations between ambient air quality measurements from five DC stations between October 2001 and March 2004 and DC hospital pediatric emergency department (ED) visits for asthma exacerbations. 

 

Objective

The study objective was to provide the CDC results from the EPHTP on quantifying the relationship between air quality and pediatric ED visits for asthma among DC residents over a 3 year period. This effort also explored novel uses of traditional data to understand background disease patterns so that unexpected fluctuations could be better detected in community disease trends and thereby identify early disease outbreaks.

Submitted by elamb on

In recent years, Washington State has experienced episodes of degraded air quality from wildfires burning within the state, as well as surrounding states and provinces. Wildfire smoke, particularly the high concentrations of small particulate matter generated by incomplete combustion, can lead to a number of minor as well as significant acute health effects, such as respiratory and cardiac-related issues. As a result, Washington State is developing methodology to monitor syndromic surveillance data for evidence of health impacts across Washington State during ongoing wildfires.

Submitted by Anonymous on

This syndrome was created to query NSSP ESSENCE on CO Poisoning and Exposure

Kansas just made CO Poisoning a mandatory reportable disease, but this was done so rapidly that hospital didn't have the chance to get reporting measures/alerts in place so many of our CO Poisonings went unreported. This set of queries was created to find these cases through EDs and then educate/remind hospitals of the legislation changes.

Submitted by ZSteinKS on
Description

During the winter months, Utah experiences a temperature inversion which traps pollutants, such as fine particle pollution (PM 2.5), in the Salt Lake Valley. A previous study determined the impact of inversion on ED visits for asthma, however similar phenomena have yet to be examined using the BioSense 2.0 syndromic surveillance system. While similar studies utilize a time-stratified case-crossover design, the absence of individually identifiable information on the dashboard precludes the utilization of this methodology. Using BioSense 2.0 frontend data, an ecological study design may allow for analyses to determine the impact of inversion on ED visits for respiratory syndrome and subsyndromes from submitting facilities in Salt Lake County, UT.

Objective

To determine the association between emergency department (ED) visits for the respiratory syndrome and subsyndromes and air quality indices for fine particle pollution in Salt Lake County, UT using frontend BioSense 2.0 data.

Submitted by rmathes on
Description

Public Health England has developed a suite of syndromic surveillance systems, collecting data from a number of health care sources, and linking to public health action to try and improve the public health benefit of the surveillance.1 We aim to describe this national syndromic service, highlighting the flexibility of the systems in responding to a range of environmental incidents.

Objective

To deliver a national syndromic surveillance service, linking analytical and statistical methods with public health action to provide surveillance support for national public health programmes monitoring the spread of infectious diseases and the health impact of environmental incidents in England.

Submitted by rmathes on
Description

In the event of a large-scale public health crisis, successfully detecting and assessing health threats and monitoring population health status over a sustained period of time is likely to require integration of information from multiple sources. In addition, this information must be shared at varying levels of detail both among different agencies or organizations within an affected locality and among response participants at local, state, and federal levels of government. In early 2007, the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) proposed a project to support member initiated consultations on priority unresolved questions in the field of syndromic surveillance (SS) research, development, or practice. The Duval County Health Department sought and obtained ISDS support to address the use of SS data in combination with other human health and veterinary surveillance data, environmental sampling data, and plume modeling results in the event of an airborne bioterrorist (BT) attack. To date, the development of SS in Florida has mainly focused on systems that monitor information from emergency department (ED) visits. In addition, because SS development was decentralized and managed primarily by county health departments, various systems were used in Florida, including ESSENCE, STARS, EARS and BioDefend.

Objective

The objective of this consultation was to develop expert, consensus-based recommendations for use of SS in combination with other human health, animal health, and environmental data sources to improve situational awareness in the event of a large-scale public health emergency. The consultation, convened by the Duval County, Florida, Health Department, involved other local and state public health offi cials from Florida who addressed this question in the context of a hypothetical BT attack scenario in Duval County. Insights arising from the consultation will be used to strengthen public health surveillance capacities as part of both local and state emergency preparedness efforts in Florida. The approach used by the consultation may be useful to other health departments seeking to enhance their emergency situational awareness capacity.

Submitted by uysz on
Description

Syndromic surveillance information can be a useful for the early recognition of outbreaks, acute public health events and in response to natural disasters. Inhalation of particulate matter from wildland fire smoke has been linked to various acute respiratory and cardiovascular health effects. Historically, wildfire disasters occur across Southern California on a recurring basis. During 2003 and 2007, wildfires ravaged San Diego County and resulted in historic levels of population evacuation, significant impact on air quality and loss of lives and infrastructure. In 2011, the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences awarded Michigan Tech Research Institute a grant to address the impact of fire emissions on human health, within the context of a changing climate. San Diego County Public Health Services assisted on this project through assessment of population health impacts and provisioning of syndromic surveillance data for advanced modeling.

Objective

This presentation describes how syndromic surveillance information was combined with fire emission information and spatio-temporal fire occurrence data to evaluate, model and forecast climate change impacts on future fire scenarios.

Submitted by uysz on
Description

By mid-May 2008, the State of Florida had 102 active wildfires affecting approximately 40,000 acres. In addition, the Mustang Corners Fire in Everglades National Park started on May 14 and burned throughout the month affecting another 40,000 acres of federal land. Smoke from several wildfires cast a haze over parts of south Florida, prompting the National Weather Service to issue a dense smoke advisory. The Governor declared a State of Emergency, the EOC was activated and ESF-8 requested that the Agency for Health Care Administration open a wildfire event in the Emergency Status System to track census and bed availability in the local hospitals.

Objective

We used the syndromic surveillance system ESSENCE (Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics) to evaluate emergency room visits with respiratory related chief complaints in an area with decreased air quality associated with wildfires affecting South Florida, 2008.

Submitted by uysz on

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, resulted in the release of known and suspected carcinogens into the environment. There is public concern that exposures may have resulted in increased cancers. This presentation will highlight a study evaluating cancer incidence among persons enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Registry.

Presenters

Jiehui Li, MBBS, MSc, Lead Research Scientist in Cancer Studies, World Trade Center Health Registry, New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene