Environmental Health Tools Café – Applications from EPA’s Office of Research and Development
Citation:
Christian, M. Environmental Health Tools Café – Applications from EPA’s Office of Research and Development. National Environmental Health Association Annual Educational Conference, New Orleans, LA, July 31 - August 03, 2023.
Impact/Purpose:
This Environmental Health Tools Café will include demonstrations of 3-4 tools, developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development (EPA-ORD), that support public health practitioner efforts with health impact assessments, waste management, chemical risk assessment, and participatory air quality monitoring. Tools to be demonstrated include EnviroAtlas, I-Waste, CompTox Chemicals Dashboard, and the Smoke Sense Application.
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development (EPA-ORD) has a suite of publicly available, web-based tools for public health practitioner use to address pressing environmental health challenges. This Environmental Health Tools Café will offer brief demonstrations on 3-4 tools and web applications that support practitioner efforts with health impact assessments, waste management, chemical risk assessment, and participatory air quality monitoring: · EnviroAtlas is an online interactive mapping application that contains over 200 maps available for the U.S. (as well as 100+ fine-scale maps for selected U.S. communities) about existing and potential benefits from the local natural environment. Users can use the tool to consider place-based environmental, demographic, and socio-economic information to assess health impacts and benefits from nature and stressors. This tool is relevant to environmental and public health professionals, researchers, educators, government, and non-governmental organizations that have an interest in conducting health impact assessments and understanding how environmental health factors influence one another. · Incident Waste Decision Support Tool (I-WASTE DST) is a tool where waste management officials can access technical information, regulations, and guidance to work through important disposal issues to assure safe and efficient removal, transport, treatment, and/or disposal of debris and waste materials. Users of the tool can quickly produce an order of magnitude waste estimate, access the treatment and disposal facility database, navigate through applicable guidance and information presented in a logical framework, and/or explore other related guidance information. I-WASTE is a relevant tool to city planners, emergency responders, and other individuals responsible for making disposal decisions. · CompTox Chemicals Dashboard is a web-based tool that houses chemistry, toxicity and exposure information for over 875,000 chemicals, including data and models, that can help inform chemical risk assessment and identifying chemicals that need more testing. The available data in the Dashboard includes, but is not limited to, chemical properties, environmental fate and transport, hazard (e.g., point of departure, legacy toxicity values, screening levels, exposure limits), in vitro to in vivo extrapolation (IVIVE), exposure, and bioactivity. This tool is relevant for federal, state, health agency, academics, and industry decision makers for chemical risk assessment. Smoke Sense Application is a mobile phone application that allows users to explore maps of current and forecasted air quality, learn about how to protect health from wildfire smoke, and record their smoke experiences, health symptoms, and behaviors taken to reduce their exposures to smoke. This tool is relevant to educators, departments of public health, and community-based organizations interested in air quality related to wildland and prescribed fire events and health effects.