The National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network is a dynamic surveillance system that provides health and environmental data in one easy to find Web site. Tracking Network data come from a variety of national, state, and city sources. Users of the Tracking Network can explore information and view maps, tables, and charts about health and environment across the country.

Nurses like you fulfill many duties beyond patient care. You are often an information gatekeeper for both co-workers and patients. Increased awareness and interest in environmental health is creating demand for information about the relationships between health and the environment. You may encounter questions that require research; the Tracking Network can help you find answers. The Network can also help you find quality data and information to meet the information needs of patients and peers.

Nurses can use the Tracking Network in many ways:

• Find answers to questions about how the environment can affect health
• Educate patients about behaviors that can protect health
• Identify patterns in communities' concerns about the environment's effects on health
• Use data to educate members of affected communities
• Find data for grant applications and research
• Use information for training colleagues or students

School Nurses

Analysis showed that the Bradford Area and Oley Valley school districts in Pennsylvania had the highest prevalence of reported asthma for the school years 1997 through 2003. School nurses tracked asthma cases at all 501 public school districts in Pennsylvania, and then tracked all students with asthma in the two districts with the highest prevalence of asthma cases.

Using information from this school-based asthma surveillance project, the Pennsylvania Tracking Program can now target prevention strategies. By providing prevention strategies and educational materials on asthma and asthma triggers to the affected schools and communities, they increased knowledge about asthma and helped reduce exposure to potential environmental triggers.

Public Health Nurses

Listen to this podcast about why the American Nurses Association supports the Tracking Network and how one local public health nurse used the Massachusetts Tracking Network to:

• Analyze data on water contaminants to investigate an increase in low birth weight babies, and
• Develop public health interventions, such as skin cancer screening days and public education about sun safe behaviors.

The National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network provides data on a variety of conditions, including:

• Asthma
• Birth Defects
• Cancer
• Childhood Lead Poisoning
• Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
• Heart Attacks
• Reproductive and Birth Outcomes
• Water contaminants
• Air contaminants

CDC offers an online course, Environmental Public Health Tracking 101, which provides an overview of the major components of environmental public health tracking. The course consists of 12 modules within three sections. Topics include how to use the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network (link to www.cdc.gov/ephtracking), surveillance and epidemiology, types of tracking data, and geographic information systems.

The online course is available at www.nehacert.org. The course can be accessed by entering "Tracking 101" in the search box. Continuing Nursing Education* contact hours are available at no charge.

• Program Overview
• Access Tracking Data
• Common Environmental Health Hazards
• Health Effects of the Environment
• Population Data
• Information by Location