Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #119381

Erin K. Dreyling, BA, Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 624 N. Broadway 7th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21205, 443-287-6533, edreylin@jhsph.edu

Environmental public health tracking offers many opportunities to establish and monitor trends of environmentally related diseases and exposures in order to advance our knowledge about environment and health relationships. Effective environmental public health tracking requires a coordinated approach to identify and utilize summary measures of environmental hazards, exposures, and health outcomes. Such measures are termed environmental public health indicators (EPHI). EPHI can also be used to link environmental exposure and disease data in order to generate hypotheses about the etiology of environmentally related diseases and to identify future research needs. In order to advance the utilization of EPHI for environmental tracking purposes, this paper presents the results of three EPHI projects. These projects were carried out by the Johns Hopkins Center for Excellence in Environmental Public Health Tracking and examine air toxics and leukemia, mercury emissions and fish advisories, and urban sprawl and obesity. These case studies provide a systematic approach for selecting and utilizing indicators of environmental hazards, exposures, and health outcomes to establish temporal and geographic trends. In addition, these projects demonstrate that EPHI linkage projects can be successfully carried out and identify the common obstacles encountered when linking indicators of hazards, exposures, and health outcomes.

Learning Objectives:

• To provide a systematic approach for selecting and utilizing indicators to establish temporal and geographic trends in environmental public health tracking.
• To demonstrate how environmental public health indicators can be used to link exposures with health outcomes.
• To identify common obstacles when linking environmental public health indicators of hazards, exposures, and health outcomes.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.