CDC’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Network www.cdc.gov/ephtracking (EPHTN) provides information and data on environmental hazards and health problems that may result in chronic illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths affected by these type of hazards.
Chronic disease accounts for about 7 out of 10 deaths in the U.S. each year and is also the leading cause of disability. Many chronic diseases such as asthma, cancer, and heart disease are affected by environmental conditions. Understanding how health and the environment are connected is an essential step in efforts to protect the health of communities.
Collecting this information over time, makes it possible to see trends and patterns as well as changes in those trends and patterns. EPHTN provides information on where environmental hazards exist, where exposures happen, and how targeted action can protect health, reduce illness, and save lives.
EPHTN originally received funding to fund twenty state and local health departments and three schools of public health. In 2009, CDC added six more tracking states that included Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Vermont and eventually, EPHTN moved from planning and capacity building to the implementation stage.
Through the years and through partnerships with others, CDC has worked to build environmental public health capacity, increase collaboration between environmental and health agencies, identify and evaluate environmental and health data systems, build partnerships with nongovernmental organizations and communities, and develop model systems linking environmental and health data.
The Colorado Environmental Health Tracking Program www.coepht.dphe.state.co.us helps with information. In Colorado the geographic location of patient hospital stays and documenting where the patient lives is missing up to one-third of the time. This limits practitioners and researchers ability to assess community health outcomes as they need to know if outcomes are related to environmental factors.
To help solve the problem, The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment www.cdphe.state.co.us and the Colorado Hospital Association www.cha.com, now has geocoded hospital discharge records from 2004 to the present. Geocodes assign a precise residence geography to at least 95 percent of the records. This enables practitioners and researchers to be able to evaluate more effectively the relationship between environmental hazards or exposures and hospital stays.
CDC has plans to add new information to the EPHTN this year:
- New pesticide exposure data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers www.aapcc.org will be available soon
- A summary of heat stress hospitalizations surveillance data will be added in the fall with data showing trends in heat stress illnesses during 2000-2010 in states that received tracking network grants
- A new multiple measures comparison feature coming this year will enable the user to compare data sets using interactive maps
- The Info-By-Location searching feature will be redesigned to be more user friendly and include infographic style data displays