Environmental Health Indicators Bridging the Chasm of Public Health and the Environment: Workshop Summary (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 81-96
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From page 81... ...
Recent controversies surrounding the arsenic in drinking water rule and ongoing debates concerning the scientific basis for Clean Air Act standards underscore a critical challenge for the future of environmental health. Fundamental questions concerning the public health benefits of environmental policies must be addressed: Do these policies really work?
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From page 82... ...
Building upon the improved national capacity for disease surveillance and public health preparedness, environmental health tracking can provide essential support for our environmental protection efforts, while improving our understanding of the relationship between the environment and health. ENSURING USABILITY IN ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH MONITORING Baruch Fischhoff and Henry Willis One of the challenges of environmental health monitoring is that these data will be used at a number of levels -- local, state, national, and international.
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From page 83... ...
The Canadian Standards Organization's guide to risk management is particularly good at showing how to make communication integral to the process. In the United States, EPA has conducted many comparative risk projects demonstrating how science can be put at the service of citizens so that they can better understand the risks that they are facing and set appropriate priorities.
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From page 84... ...
The American Chemistry Council (ACC) recognizes the importance of these issues and offers its support for the concept of a comprehensive public health surveillance system, further recognizing that it would improve the ability of local, state, and federal public health agencies to track priority chronic diseases and risk factors for disease, as well as aid in generating hypotheses for research on disease causation.
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From page 85... ...
4. The local vector control district discovers antibodies for West Nile virus in its sentinel bird surveillance program.
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From page 86... ...
2. A coordinated and consistent set of environmental objectives applicable at the federal, state, and local levels, with appropriate indicators and data elements defined.
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From page 87... ...
In recent decades, issues of chemical pollution have been in the forefront in most developed countries, including urban air pollution from motor vehicles and industry, exposures to chemicals in agriculture, and long-distance pollution from coal- and oilpowered electricity production. In addition, the threats of catastrophic radiation pollution from nuclear power plants and the new challenges brought by greenhouse gas emissions require foresighted prevention and monitoring systems.
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From page 88... ...
. The DPSEEA framework acknowledges that for pressures on the environment to be created there are usually driving forces of policy, technological change, or economic circumstances.
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From page 89... ...
USGS investigations that contribute toward a better understanding of public health and the environment span a range of scales from the planetary to the molecular and atomic. Whether the concern is transport of microbes or anthropogenic materials on dust particles that travel large distances around the earth or the spread of wildlife and human disease in a more localized area, the USGS applies a wide variety of expertise in natural sciences and state-of-the-art technology where needed.
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From page 90... ...
If you are an African-American child living in older housing in the United States, your chance of having an elevated blood lead level is 22 times as likely as that of a white child in newer housing. We wouldn't have this information if we didn't have good surveillance data.
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From page 91... ...
There are a lot of different diseases that are reportable, and we have a lot of different surveillance systems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) , such as childhood blood lead surveillance, the national report on human exposure, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS)
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From page 92... ...
Our goal is to move beyond narrowly defined traditional clean air, water, waste, and land-use issues to more broadly encompass ecosystems and human health; it is these complex relationships that drive many of today's hard questions. The EPA's State of the Environment Report will focus on the relationship of ecological and human health to our air, water, and landrelated programs and will consist of two phases.
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From page 93... ...
Useful environmental health indicators confront a number of implementation challenges if they are to be provided as web-based services, including the following: · integrating ontologies and data sources across knowledge domains, · developing privacy protections, and · supporting information intermediaries that are less subject to sci entific and regulatory constraints. ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH MONITORING IN THE WORKPLACE: SAFEGUARDING WORKERS AND ADVANCING PUBLIC HEALTH Kathleen Rest The work environment is a critical public health interface and integral to discussions of environmental health.
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From page 94... ...
Integration of the work environment can advance the public's environmental health because: the workplace can contribute critical information about exposure-effect relationships; mandated and voluntary worker monitoring programs already exist and can provide wealth of data; the infrastructure for occupational surveillance is in place or developing in some states; and occupational health professionals can
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From page 95... ...
The time is right to enhance both federal and state capacity in environmental and occupational health tracking and to exploit potential synergies for advancing public health.
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