Public Health agencies have shared a long-standing role in monitoring environmental pollutants as well astheir potential health outcomes. These agencies have worked to mitigate the impact of environmentalhazards on the public's health by managing waste and hazardous materials; monitoring lead, asbestos,radon, unintentional injury; and ensuring food safety as well as water and air quality. A key component tothese activities is an effective health information system which would provide public health agencies theability to collect, analyze, share and react to information regarding the impact of environmental hazards inthe community. Having the infrastructure to implement a health information system will enable public healthagencies to proactively identify and contain emerging environmental health issues. An important strategy foraddressing these emerging issues will be the implementation of the Environmental Public Health TrackingNetwork (EPHTN). Data resulting from the initiative will be used to identify populations most likely to beaffected by environmental exposures in the community. Furthermore, these surveillance initiatives will allowpublic health to collectively demonstrate a better understanding of the total burden of disease by linkinghealth data to environmental hazards and exposures and assuring that communities have the capacity torespond to this information. In an effort to broaden resource coverage for public health agencies in thenortheastern corridor, The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (Pittsburgh, PA) iscollaborating with the Drexel University School of Public Health (Philadelphia, PA) to build a regionalacademic center for environmental public health surveillance. The U of Pitt /Drexel Public Health Alliance isuniquely positioned to act as an academic partner to health-related agencies in a local, state and regionalinitiative to facilitate environmental capacity building, to evaluate existing surveillance methodologies and todevelop innovative strategies and tools to link hazards, exposures and health effects databases for theEPHTN. Our goal for this project is to develop and critically evaluate within a broad-based hazard-exposureheatheffect data infrastructure that is comprehensive enough to facilitate complex environmental health datalinkage yet straightforward enough to be utilized effectively by public health personnel through easilyaccessible, web-based applications for environmental health tracking and disease surveillance.
| Glad, Jo Ann; Brink, LuAnn Lynn; Talbott, Evelyn O et al. (2012) The relationship of ambient ozone and PM(2.5) levels and asthma emergency department visits: possible influence of gender and ethnicity. Arch Environ Occup Health 67:103-8 |
| Shire, Jeffrey D; Marsh, Gary M; Talbott, Evelyn O et al. (2011) Advances and current themes in occupational health and environmental public health surveillance. Annu Rev Public Health 32:109-32 |
