New Mexico Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) Program
In 2008 the New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) completed the second year of a five-year Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cooperative agreement to develop an Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) program. The CDC program’s purpose is to provide state health departments with resources to implement statewide networks that integrate data sets, tools, and standards to allow the state EPHT network to be an interoperable component of the National EPHT Network. The National EPHT program addresses the Environmental Health and Public Health Infrastructure focus area of “Healthy People 2010.” Outcomes of the program will align with the National Center for Environmental Health goals: Prevent or reduce illnesses, injury and death related to environmental risk factors; and increase the understanding of the relationship between environmental exposures and health effects. The NM EPHT Network, in support of the National EPHT Network, is used to identify potential relationships between exposure and health conditions that either require intervention to prevent disease, disability, and injury or indicate the need for investigation.
EDAC continues to develop and has implemented the Web-based New Mexico EPHT System, a key component of the state and national networks. This interactive application provides researchers, public health authorities, healthcare practitioners, policy makers, and the public with tools to understand the possible associations between environmental hazards and adverse health effects. These tools allow data discovery, download, visualization - especially mapping, and analysis. EDAC has also designed and created the New Mexico EPHT Project Web site. The Project site is publicly accessible and provides information on environmental exposures and health effects through narratives and data displays (tables, maps, charts, and graphs). These two Web sites, the EPHT System and EPHT Project sites, complement each other through interactive and static approaches to learning about environmental public health in New Mexico. EDAC further supports the EPHT program through national and state demonstrations and presentations for the Web sites and for FGDC-compliant metadata creation.
