Environmental Health

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.

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 and gaps in the nation'™s environmental health surveillance infrastructure. 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. As a primary objective of the Tracking Program, the Environmental Public Health Tracking Network (Tracking Network) was developed as an online surveillance system with data available for 23 topics and over 450 different health, environmental, and population measures. The integration and display of such disparate data can be challenging. For data consumers without scientific training, or even scientists and public health professionals with limited time, it can be difficult to examine and explore the data in an online surveillance system. Additionally, casual data consumers may not require complex data details; a big picture perspective may be appropriate to their needs. The Tracking Network which applies standardized data, a modern user interface, techniques catering to a variety of data consumers, and best practices in data visualization provides a dynamic data query system that allows users to visualize different types of environmental health data in numerous ways including a variety of charting, mapping, and graphing options. Objective: The presenter will demonstrate complex health and environment surveillance data visualization techniques within the CDC's Environmental Public Health Tracking Network.

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.

The use of syndromic surveillance in Tulsa County began as an attempt to identify symptoms associated with Category A agents, namely Anthrax. The underlying premise for adopting the system was the hope that an astute clinician, upon observing clusters of cases exhibiting certain symptoms, would rapidly notify the local health department so that an epidemiological investigation could be initiated. The system is also designed to send spatial and temporal alerts when cases of pre-defined syndromes are observed. Since 2002, when the system was first implemented, Tulsa Health Department has looked for other ways to integrate syndromic surveillance into its daily operations, and to expand its focus from an exclusive bioterrorism tool, to one that is broader in scope. One such way has been to  utilize the system to identify other syndromes and conditions. Collected emergency data has therefore, been used to identify occurrences of animal bites, mental conditions etc. This paper addresses the use of syndromic surveillance for the identification of heat-related illnesses during the hot Oklahoma summer months.

Objective

This paper describes the application of syndromic surveillance methodologies to identify nonbioterrorism syndromes particularly, the incidence of heat-related syndromes during the hot Oklahoma summer months.