Massachusetts’s Environmental Public Health Tracking

Massachusetts’s Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) website, launched as part of a CDC pilot program in 2008, provides data and visualization tools that are useful in detecting environmental health risks and trends. Users can view rates of asthma, heart attacks, heat stress, and other health conditions exacerbated by climate change. While not all of its tools are related to the public health impact of climate change, the tracker’s tools do allow users - whether individuals, public health officials, or policy makers - to analyze health data and trends over time at the state, county, or census tract level. Other notable features include the High Impact Assessment, which can be used to assess the health impact of proposals, ranging from transportation projects to land use policies.

In 2014, the Bureau of Environmental Health and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health released an assessment of Local Health Departments’ capacity to respond to the health impacts of climate change. The assessment underscored the need for the EPHT, finding that the majority of local health departments did not feel adequately prepared to respond to climate change’s health threats, highlighting the need for additional tracking, training, and technical assistance.

An educational section on Environmental Justice (EJ) is included in the Community Profile tool. As part of the tool, users can select any municipality and learn more about environmental health and compare local averages for asthma, heart attacks, air quality, and drinking water quality with statewide averages. The EJ section of the tool points out that members of minority racial and ethnic groups, as well as people experiencing poverty “are more likely to live near toxic waste sites, in areas with high pollution, and in substandard housing” and might not be able to access health care.


The website is a project of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Bureau of Environmental Health, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Through this program, Massachusetts collaborates with other states to share resources and better understand regional trends in health outcomes, many of which are impacted by climate change.

 

Related Organizations:

  • Massachusetts Department of Public Health
  • Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
  • State of Massachusetts

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  • Tool (general)
  • Websites

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