Welcome to South Carolina Environmental Public Health Tracking,
a window to the world of your health and environment.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines the National EPHT project as “…an initiative to protect communities by providing information to all those who can use it to take action and make decisions to improve health.” It is important to realize that your individual environmental health is composed of your potential exposures where you live, where you work and where you play. South Carolina’s EPHT module provides information on environmental health issues like fishing advisories for your area and information on other environmental health issues around the state. The SC EPHT also provides resources on other environmental health concerns such as household chemicals and workplace exposures. |
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The CDC has designed a process and provided the participating states with a list of very specific public health variables that they want the states to track nationally, including: Regional Air Monitoring and Drinking Water Quality Data; Childhood Lead Data, Hospitalization Data for Asthma and Heart Attacks; Medical Treatment for Carbon Monoxide Poisoning, certain types of Cancers, and Premature and Low Birth-weight births. Click here to learn more about the CDC EPHT National Network. The CDC’s process of selecting what to track was complicated by the fact that some public health indicators are more difficult to measure than others. It is also important to understand that because most environmental health hazards involve chronic or long term exposures to low concentrations; it is often very difficult to determine whether or not a specific exposure has led to a specific health outcome. One of the goals of EPHT is to make data more accessible to researchers who can then look for associations between environmental hazards and diseases/illnesses. The initial measures selected by the CDC are those for which historical data is available in most states. Additional measures will be added to this tracking system in the future and additional years of data will be added as they become available. |
See what's new with the National EPHT Network: |
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The more you know about your environment as a whole, the better you are able to manage risks in the world around you. We hope that you find the information and data found in these pages to be a useful resource. Let us know what you think. |
To participate in a nationwide network of integrated health and environmental data that drives actions to improve the health of communities.
"If you want to learn about the health of a popoulation, look at the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the places where they live."
- Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, in the Fifth Century BC
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