Environmental Health Tracking

Environmental health tracking is the ongoing systematic collection, integration, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data about environmental hazards, exposure to environmental hazards, and health effects potentially related to exposure to environmental hazards.

An environmental health tracking network facilitates the following public health actions:

• Track environmental hazards to guide exposure prevention efforts;
• Track disease trends to understand if they are changing over time in residents statewide, in specific populations, or in certain geographic areas;
• Link environmental hazard information, exposure data, and disease reports to support environmental health research;
• Inform the development and evaluate the effectiveness of disease prevention and environmental protection programs and policies;
• Facilitate public access to information on environmental health issues.

The California Environmental Health Tracking Program (CEHTP) of the Environmental Health Investigations Branch, funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 2002, is working to implement a state-of-the-art environmental health tracking network in California. The CEHTP web portal provides you the ability to query, visualize, and save environmental health information. The CEHTP also provides tools and services that allow users or other websites to interact with high resolution data in flexible and customizable ways.