In 2002, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began to fund state health departments and Three academic centers to begin to develop a national Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) network. For the past 3 years, the Berkeley Center for Environmental Public Health Tracking has been engaged in multiple activities designed to assist the CDC and partner health departments in the building the network. In this application for renewed funding, we propose to continue our work with the overall goal of supporting increased capacity for EPHT by developing methods and analyses that can contribute to better ability of both technical and non-technical audiences to understand relationships among environmental factors (hazards), exposures, and health outcomes and to act on this knowledge to protect health at the national, regional, and community levels.
The specific aims we propose to achieve this goal are grouped under three broad themes: 1) asthma surveillance and the environment; 2) assessment and characterization of environmental factors (hazards) and exposures; and 3) environmental justice and health disparities.
Under specific aim 1, we will develop capacity to obtain ongoing local-level asthma prevalence and severity data with a school-based, survey approach in Fresno; compare prevalence estimates from the school survey instrument with prevalence estimates from school nurse-based surveillance programs in CT and MA; and collaborate with the CA EPHT program to determine whether any indicators used in that program's managed care-based surveillance pilot project can estimate asthma prevalence and/or severity in Oakland and to study the relationship of exposure to pesticides and asthma outcomes in Fresno.
Under specific aim 2, we will merge biomonitoring data with geographically-based emissions and environmental sample data to increase the relevance of hazard indicators; improve methods for combining the geographic distributions of environmental factors with information on human population distributions and activities; develop sets of measures that represent and interpret currently available data about hazards and exposures; conduct a case study of surveillance of lead exposures to identify factors that contribute to improved data quality; and use a case study focused on asthma in children to develop communication tools to disseminate to state health and environmental agencies tracking information that will support actions to address pertinent environmental factors.
Under specific aim 3, we will develop methods to address environmental justice and health disparities in EPHT in general and for schools in particular. In addition to these specific aims, we will establish an internship program for students that will train them in EPHT and a consultative group among EPHT program partners and other critical stakeholders to build capacity through on-going communication of relevant knowledge, project accomplishments, barriers, and lessons learned.
