The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA

Abstract #73790

Peggy Reynolds, PhD, Environmental Health Investigations Branch, California Department of Health Services, 1515 Clay Street, Suite 1700, Oakland, CA 94612, 510-622-4417, preynold@dhs.ca.gov

There is a long history of community concerns that environmental factors might contribute to apparent “clusters” of rare health outcomes such as childhood cancer. Inevitably there are too few events on a community by community basis to provide sufficient study power to detect risk associations of interest, if they exist. Furthermore, environmental exposures are difficult to estimate in more traditional epidemiologic study designs, which rely on respondent self-report for factors which may be unknown to the individual. With the advent of new geographic information system (GIS) tools, the California Department of Health Services has been able to undertake a series of studies broader in scale, integrating several independent sources of information, in order to evaluate the patterns of cancer with respect to environmental risk factors of interest. Examples of this approach will be given for a statewide study of childhood cancers, which uses two complementary study designs and GIS tools to estimate exposure potential to several environmental toxics that have been of public interest, particularly to agricultural pesticides and mobile source emissions.

Learning Objectives:

• To gain a better understanding of how GIS methods can be used in epidemiologic studies.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: N/A
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.