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Online mapping system provides cancer statistics
Monday, February 26, 2001 By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In the Oscar-nominated movie "Erin Brockovich," the heroine does it the hard way, trudging door to door in her stiletto heels searching for cancer cases that might be linked to pollution from a nearby factory.
But starting today, those in search of such information can click on a mouse and go to a Web site established by Health-Track, a nonprofit public health organization.
There, a new online mapping system will offer, for the first time, easy access to data from the National Cancer Institute on mortality rates for cancers known or suspected to have environmental causes.
The Web site -- www.imapdata.com/health-track -- also provides data from the Environmental Protection Agency on hazardous air pollutants and chemical releases of known or probable carcinogens, although the map doesn't directly link cancer deaths with toxic releases. And it doesn't show disease rates or exposures.
Still, "this kind of mapping allows us to see patterns that should then be explored," said James O'Hara, executive director of Health Track, which was established with a grant to Georgetown University by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
"All too often we are not collecting health information or collecting it and environmental hazard information with no linkage established between the health and environmental data," he said. "Both should be collected with an eye to how they can inform each other so that health professionals and our communities can use the information to prevent disease and promote the public health."
Such a system would cost about $275 million a year -- less than $1 for every American, O'Hara said -- and Health Track's hope is that the cancer map, which charts the mortality rates of eight cancers from 1970 to 1994, will build public demand for tracking and monitoring of other chronic diseases such as asthma and Parkinson's disease.
Currently, there's very little of that going on, O'Hara said, mainly because of cost and difficulty. While infectious diseases such as influenza have been closely monitored since the early part of this century, "we haven't made a similar investment in chronic diseases, simply because they aren't as easily identified and represent a complex interplay between genetic, environmental and behavioral factors."
Very often, it takes a crisis to prompt action. Texas, O'Hara noted, has a very up-to-date birth defect registry, in part because a large number of such cases surfaced in South Texas some years ago. And the country made huge strides in food safety tracking after a virulent strain of E. coli bacteria was detected in hamburgers in the Northwest. Last summer's response to the West Nile virus was also swift.
But the asthma epidemic is into its second decade and there is little or no information available about where and when attacks occur and whether environmental links are involved, he noted.
Richard McGarvey, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Health, said he was unaware of the cancer map project. But he said it would be much more difficult to track the incidences of chronic diseases and link them to the environment.
"You need to know if the person smoked, what was their nutrition intake, all kinds of things, and whenever you try to relate such cases to environmental factors, that's not an easy thing to do." he said.
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