Planning and Capacity Building Activities
| Grantee: | State of Nevada Department of Human Resources |
|---|---|
| Contact: | Alexander Haartz, MPH |
| Telephone: | 775-684-4200 |
| E-mail: | ahaartz@nvhd.state.nv.us |
| Address: | Department of Human Resources Health Division 505 E. King Street, Room 201 Carson City, NV 89701-4797 |
| Web site: | http://health2k.state.nv.us/track/ [external link] |
| Funded Since: | September 30, 2002 |
| Funded Program: | National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, Part A |
Program Description:
Using lessons learned from the joint investigation between Nevada, CDC, and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) of the Churchill County, Nevada, childhood leukemia cluster, Nevada’s project will build upon the strengths of a Coordinating Technical Leadership Team comprising dedicated staff from the divisions of Health and Environmental Protection, Department of Agriculture, Department of Information Technology, and the Nevada Indian Commission. The technical team will serve as partners and consultants to a Nevada EPHTS Planning Consortium comprised of representatives from tribes, hospitals, public health agencies, environmental agencies, rural agriculture support agencies, community members, and regulatory bodies such as the State Board of Health and the State Environmental Commission.
Nevada’s Environmental Public Health Tracking System (EPHTS) project has four major goals:
- Identify and increase the public health and environmental exposure
prevention, surveillance, and reporting infrastructure capacities at
the state, local, and tribal levels
- Improve understanding of policy makers, community leaders, tribal
leaders, and citizens about the relations between exposure to
environmental hazards and health effects such as asthma, cancer, and
lead and arsenic poisoning
- Facilitate the integration of an environmental public health
surveillance system with Nevada’s National Electronic Disease
Surveillance System (NEDSS), the federal Environmental Protection
Agency’s National Environmental Information Exchange Network, and a
surveillance system being established under the Health Resources and
Services Administration’s hospital bioterrorism preparedness
initiative
- Create a state of “readiness” and partnership among stakeholders and their constituents so that these planning activities will lead to a funded implementation stage that we envisage as the logical next step to the EPHTS program.
Routine, continuous public health surveillance efforts in Nevada focus on communicable diseases, cancer, birth defects (including inborn errors of metabolism), and newborn hearing screening. Beginning in Year 1, a comprehensive inventory of environmental hazards, chemical (including agricultural chemicals) inventories, and non-infectious disease surveillance systems maintained by state and local governmental agencies will be developed. Systems maintained by local chapters of non-profit organizations such as the American Lung Association and the March of Dimes will also be included in this inventory process. The needs and concerns of all stakeholders and data users including governmental agencies, nongovernmental organizations, health care providers, academic institutions, businesses that use hazardous materials, and concerned citizens will be identified and prioritized. Also, a statewide public awareness campaign to educate the public, policy makers, and opinion leaders about the relationship between human exposure to environmental hazards and chronic diseases will be developed and implemented in Year 1. A community-based, stakeholder planning process will be used to create a plan for staged development of a standards-based EPHTS that allows direct electronic data reporting and linkage within and across health effect, exposure, and hazard data and that is accessible to local, state, and national public health and environmental protection agencies.
Additionally, Nevada proposes to establish a partnership with a local community to implement the Protocol for Assessing Community Excellence in Environmental Health as a strategy to promote community readiness. This also will provide a real-time evaluative tool against which to compare the developed surveillance system’s ability to appropriately identify, classify, report, track, and respond to incidents of human exposure to environmental public health hazards.
