Amy D Kyle, PhD MPH, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, 322 Cortland Ave, PMB-226, San Francisco, CA 94110, 510-642-8847, adkyle@socrates.berkeley.edu

Environmental public health seeks to understand how environmental factors adversely affect people and to take steps to eliminate or prevent such effects. Environmental public health tracking seeks to collect and analyze data in order to describe such relationships over time and space. This is complex in part because many environmental agents of concern are associated with multiple adverse health effects, and many adverse health effects of interest are associated with multiple environmental agents. Early development of environmental public health tracking has emphasized the linkage of data about environmental hazards, exposure, and adverse health effects. However, development of metrics for environmental concentration and human body burden data provides a means to develop agreement about the significance of data, to address the “many to many” relationships between environmental factors and disease, and to communicate the meaning of data to stakeholders. As an example, this analysis presents alternative metrics to represent environmental concentrations of air pollutants and presents an interpretation of the metrics based on current knowledge about relationships between ambient concentrations of air pollutants and health outcomes. Attention to the development and use of such metrics will contribute to the ability of the public health community to understand tracking data and to explain what it means in a public context.

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