Amy D. Kyle, PhD MPH, Center of Excellence for Environmental Public Health Tracking, University of California Berkeley, School of Public Health, 140 Warren Hall MC 7369, EHS, Berkeley, CA 94720, 510 642 8847, adkyle@socrates.berkeley.edu and Tracey J. Woodruff, Office of Policy, Economics and Innovation, US Environmental Protection Agency, 75 Hawthorne St, MC SPE-1, San Francisco, CA 94105.

The significance of environmental factors is increasingly understood as central to public health, in ambient and built environments. Assessment and management of the environmental factors that affect health require acquisition and analysis of data from the environmental and health sectors. In the US, an environmental public health tracking initiative is intended to improve linkages of environmental and health data and assessment of environmental factors contributing to disease. A critical challenge is to develop approaches that identify populations at greatest risk and the environmental factors and combination of factors that are likely to affect such groups. Approaches that can determine whether disparities exist are essential to provide a full picture of the environmental health status of the population and to identify intervention and policy needs. Assessing differences by age, gender, race/ethnicity, socio-economic status, and net pollution burden or cumulative risk may lead to insights about areas in which to target attention. This session presents an overview of methods used to assess disparities in exposure to important environmental factors, considering age, race/ethnicity, and socio economic status, using types of data sources typically available in the US, focusing on resolution of environmental factors to geographic scales that are compatible with demographic information. Though limited, such methods can be informative, and in some cases can be enhanced by coordinated consideration of related environmental concentrations, body burdens, and health outcomes. The analyses draw upon a set of measures for children’s environmental health for the US and analyses of distributions and net burdens of air pollutants.

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