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New Effort To Track Environmental Links
to Disease
Autism and Asthma not previously monitored
by Dorsey Griffith, Sacramento
Bee, http://www.sacbee.com/
For more articles on disabilities and special ed visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
Federal health officials Monday enlisted the help of
California and other states in a
landmark effort to track chronic
diseases. The federal government has
long tracked infectious diseases such as
smallpox, AIDS, and the
recently detected West Nile virus, but chronic
diseases and disorders such as asthma and autism, and
their potential environmental
causes, have never been similarly monitored.
In announcing the awards of $14
million Monday, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention is beginning to address
this discrepancy. The money will go
to 17 states and three universities, including the University
of California, Berkeley, to set up
surveillance systems for environmental
exposure and disease.
"Seventy percent of death and disability is due
to chronic diseases such as cancer,
diabetes and Parkinson's. These are
today's new health threats," said
Shelley Hearne, whose efforts as director of the Pew
Environmental Health Commission pushed Congress to
address environmental health
threats. Hearne, now
executive director of Trust for America's Health, hopes
that the tracking programs will allow states to zero in
on disease clusters in
individual communities -- such as the spate of lymphoma and
leukemia cases among
Auberry Drive residents in Sacramento County -- and act
quickly to resolve them.
"Both from our knowledge of history and from
current science, there are answers
waiting out there," she said. "There
are extraordinary prevention
opportunities, but we are not even looking."
Officials hope the individual
state systems will eventually form a
nationwide tracking system and guide federal health and
environmental policies.
Dr. John Balmes, an environmental health
sciences professor at Berkeley and
principal investigator for the
university's CDC grant, said the
awards signal an important new emphasis on public health at
the federal level.
"If they have accurate data about environmental
exposures and health outcomes from
states, interventions can be
designed to actually decrease the
adverse health outcomes related to environmental exposures,"
Balmes said. In California,
the $971,000 grant will be used in partnership with the
state Office of Environmental
Health Hazard Assessment to plan a
surveillance system. The money comes one year after
the state Legislature passed
a bill establishing an environmental health tracking network.
Paul English, an epidemiologist and the
principal investigator for the
state's CDC grant, said a group of
experts already has assembled to
determine which diseases should be monitored. Currently,
county health departments are only
required to report to the state certain infectious
diseases such as tuberculosis and
meningitis.
Once a list of diseases with likely
environmental causes is established,
English said, the state will attempt to
link them with its
environmental hazard data -- air pollution levels or known
releases of toxic chemicals in
certain geographical areas, for example. Eventually, he
said, blood or tissue testing could
help health officials make links
between known environmental
pollutants and human disease.
The effort pleases Anne Kelsey, director of the
regional asthma management and
prevention initiative of the Public
Health Institute in Berkeley.
"There are a lot of gaps in our knowledge about
the various, complex causes of
asthma -- particularly the
environmental factors," she said. "This
will help us understand where to best focus our
efforts." At Berkeley,
one of three universities designated by the CDC as a
"Center of Excellence for Environmental Public Health
Tracking," researchers will
use the grant money to expand existing asthma tracking
efforts. Using statewide
asthma data recently collected by the UCLA School of
Public Health, Berkeley researchers will attempt to
link the disease to air
pollution exposure data collected by the California
Environmental Protection Agency.
"If we can link these two databases, that is a
first step toward having a
California tracking effort for asthma,"
said Balmes. "If we can do it
for asthma, we can do it for other health outcomes such as
birth defects."
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