Minnesota to join national health tracking network

Starting next year Minnesotans will be able to monitor public health and environmental hazards in their county by consulting one website, filling what some experts say is a gap in public knowledge.

The Minnesota Department of Health received a federal grant Thursday of $875,000 every year for the next five years. The grant will allow Minnesota to join 21 other states included on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network.

Incidences of respiratory disease, high blood lead level, cancer, low birth weight and water and air hazards are among the information that will be available on the website.

The national effort to track public health began in 2006, and was implemented in 16 states. Minnesota is part of a second wave of the program, Johnson said.

Environmental tracking has seen a “noticeable deficit in the past,” Bruce Alexander, an associate professor in environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota, said.

Alexander is one of two University professors who have served on the Minnesota Environmental Public Health Tracking System’s advisory board, which was initiated by the Minnesota Legislature in 2007, and released its first report on January 15, 2009. The other, John Adgate , is also a professor in environmental health sciences.

The goal of the Web site “isn’t to collect new data, but is to make it easier to identify existing data,” Alexander said. The data collected will be monitored to find trends, and direct prevention efforts in public health, he said.

The Minnesota Department of Health already provides information like cancer statistics by county, and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s Web site has information about some environmental concerns available to the public “pretty readily,” said Deborah Swackhamer, co-director of the

University’s Water Resources Center and a professor in environmental health sciences.

Although a lot of the data already “exists out there,” it is spread across “various agencies and various programs,” Jean Johnson, an environmental epidemiologist, said.

The Web site will put information together in one place, making it more accessible to the public, policy makers and researchers, Johnson said.

However, the most recent public health data available is from 2007, and the website “can have a one to two year lag,” Johnson said.

Part of the struggle in providing up-to-date data is balancing the tracking of information with Minnesotans’ privacy concerns. Although Minnesota is a “socially progressive” state, many people’s fear of giving out information about their private property keeps the state from being at the forefront of the tracking program, Swackhamer said.

Although details of the Web site and funding are not finalized, Alexander said the data could be available at many different levels, including metro or non-metro, by county, zip code or city. Of the federal funding, “a good portion will go to the IT piece,” other funding will go to health educators and scientists analyzing the data, Johnson said.

Although the creation of the Web site will be a “long, on-going process,” it will ultimately provide a “foundation for making decisions in public health,” Alexander said.