CDC Features

CDC Features

CDC's New Environmental Public Health Tool Helps Connect Environment and Health

Photo: Skyline of major U.S. city showing smog in the air

Use CDC's new Environmental Public Health Tracking Network to find out how the environment may be affecting your health and your family or community. The Tracking Network offers information for many environmental hazards and health conditions, such as asthma, cancer, and air and water contaminants.

Photo: Two little boys posing for picture outside For decades, the United States has faced a fundamental gap in knowing how environmental contaminants affect people's health. CDC's new Environmental Public Health Tracking Network is working to close this gap by improving environmental public health surveillance. The Tracking Network is a dynamic Web-based tool that tracks and reports environmental hazards and the health problems that may be related to them. It allows scientists, health professionals, and members of the public to see where these hazards and health problems are occurring and how they are changing over time.

To lay the foundation for the national Tracking Network, CDC is funding heath departments in 16 states and 1 city to build local tracking networks. These partners send data from their local tracking systems to the national Tracking Network to help CDC and other researchers monitor and identify trends in environmental public health data. For example, the Tracking Network can show standardized asthma hospital admission rates in the 16 participating states, which is the first step in identifying local area trends that may differ from known national level trends in asthma hospitalizations. Is your state or city participating? See our list below! CDC is also partnering with four other federal agencies for data and expertise on the development of the Tracking Network; the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Photo: Cars on busy city freeway Understanding how the environment affects people's health requires many different types of data. The Tracking Network provides information about the following:

Health effects: data about non-infectious health conditions and diseases, such as asthma, cancer, and birth defects.
Environmental hazards: data about chemicals or other substances in the environment, such as and air pollution and water contaminants.
Exposures: data about the amount of a chemical in a person's body, such as lead in blood.

CDC's Tracking Network can be used by many different people. Scientists will be better able to assess the connection between the environment and its effect on health. Public health officials now can easily assess unusual trends and events to determine which communities may be at risk. Parents can learn about conditions such as asthma or the presence of contaminants in the air in counties where they live and take action to protect their children. Elected officials can see their community's air quality trends to determine if actions taken to reduce pollution levels are working. Come explore the Tracking Network today.

Tracking in action

The stories below are just two examples of the kinds of actions that are happening in all of our funded health departments:

Massachusetts: Massachusetts ranks third in the United States for prevalence of asthma. When Massachusetts Tracking staff conducted asthma surveillance and indoor quality assessments in schools, a significant association between mold/moisture and the prevalence of asthma was found. Based on tracking data, Massachusetts staff are working with school officials to correct mold/moisture problems and to enact policy changes for reducing mold and moisture in schools.

Utah: The Utah Department of Health received a call from a citizen concerned about cases of cancer in his neighborhood. In the past, a similar call would have prompted a study that would have taken a year to complete, with most of that time spent waiting for data. In less than a day, the Utah Tracking Program was able to let this resident know that the likelihood of cancer in his area was no greater than in the state as a whole. To make this conclusion, the Utah Tracking staff used an analytic tool developed with tracking funds to conduct two independent investigations, related to space and time, of the rates of cancer centered on the citizen's residential location. This is a substantial improvement in the time and cost required for cancer investigations in the past and in the services Utah's Tracking Program is able to provide to their citizens.

Health conditions on the Tracking Network: