Integrating Research, Surveillance, and Practice in Environmental Public Health Tracking
نویسندگان
چکیده
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.
منابع مشابه
Challenges and Prospects for Integrating the Assessment of Health Impacts in the Licensing Process of Large Capital Project in Brazil
Brazil was one of the first countries in Latin America to institutionalize a National Environmental Policy in 1981, including the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process of economic activities with anticipated impacts on the environment. Today, EIA practice in Brazil comes with a number of limitations: it is constrained by its environmental advocacy role; application is strongly oriented ...
متن کاملEnvironmental public health tracking/surveillance in Canada: a commentary.
Although public debate in Canada about climate change and air pollution is louder than ever, the state of the environment remains a relatively neglected determinant of health, and environmental public health infrastructure and programs are poorly developed. Health Canada has only recently begun to develop a national environmental public health tracking or surveillance system. The authors review...
متن کاملDescribing environmental public health data: implementing a descriptive metadata standard on the environmental public health tracking network.
The Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) Network provides an opportunity to bring together diverse environmental and health effects data by integrating}?> local, state, and national databases of environmental hazards, environmental exposures, and health effects. To help users locate data on the EPHT Network, the network will utilize descriptive metadata that provide critical information ...
متن کاملWisconsin’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Network: Information Systems Design for Childhood Cancer Surveillance
In this article we describe the development of an information system for environmental childhood cancer surveillance. The Wisconsin Cancer Registry annually receives more than 25,000 incident case reports. Approximately 269 cases per year involve children. Over time, there has been considerable community interest in understanding the role the environment plays as a cause of these cancer cases. ...
متن کاملCDC's environmental public health tracking network: an innovative dynamic surveillance system for you.
T he Centers for Disease Con trol and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Environmental Public Health Tracking Network CDC’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Program (Tracking Program) began with the idea that health and environmental problems are not always separate issues with unrelated solutions. When the Tracking Program was funded in 2002, no systems existed at the state or national level to track m...
متن کامل