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ENVIRONMENTAL PUBLIC HEALTH INDICATORS AT UNITED STATES ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY
Citation:
LOBDELL, D. T., P. MURPHY, D. A. AXELRAD, AND T. J. WOODRUFF. ENVIRONMENTAL PUBLIC HEALTH INDICATORS AT UNITED STATES ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY. Presented at 19th International Society of Environmental Epidemiology Annual Meeting, Mexico City, MEXICO, September 06 - 09, 2007.
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has recently published two different indicators reports, America's Children and the Environment (ACE) and the Draft Report on the Environment (see: http://www.epa.gov/indicators/ and http://www.epa.gov/envirohealth/children/). ACE was first published in December 2000, with updates in 2003 and 2006. ACE highlights trends in environmental contaminant levels; contaminants measured in the bodies of children and women; and childhood diseases and conditions that may have environmental components. In June 2003, USEPA published its first ever national Report on the Environment (ROE), using available indicators and data to answer questions pertaining to national environmental and human health conditions. An expanded and revised update (ROE07) will be released late in 2007. With a national-level scale for both reports, developing indicators that validly and informatively incorporate both environmental and health information is difficult. Because multiple risk factors are associated with most diseases and conditions, developing a national scale environmental health indicator that exclusively reflects the environmental insult remains quite challenging. Accordingly, indicators are reported separately for ambient conditions and health trends. Using specific examples from both reports, the presentation will illustrate how identified data and information gaps were addressed and how the indicators can be impacted by these often difficult choices. Although the EPA reports will remain national in scale, both have pilot efforts to examine alternate geographic scales for reporting trends in environmental and health data. (This is an abstract of a proposed presentation and does not necessarily reflect EPA policy.)