U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program

摘要

The mission of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program (Tracking Program) is to provide information from a nationwide network of integrated health and environmental data that drives actions to improve the health of communities. In collaboration with partners, the Tracking Program identifies priority environmental health issues, determines key surveillance questions, and evaluates the utility of existing data for answering the question and informing the issue. Selected data are integrated into the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network and used to (1) describe temporal and spatial trends in disease and potential environmental exposures, (2) identify populations most affected, (3) generate hypotheses about associations between health and environmental exposures, and (4) develop, guide, and assess the environmental public health policies and interventions aimed at reducing or eliminating health outcomes associated with environmental factors. Gaps in data are addressed by developing standards for new data collections, models, or new methodologies for using existing data, or by expanding the utility of non-traditional public health data. Current data challenges include the need for more temporally and spatially resolved data to better understand the complex relationships between environmental hazards, health outcomes, and risk factors at a local level. National standards are in development for systematically generating, analyzing, and disseminating small area data and real-time data that will allow for comparisons between different datasets over geography and time.