The state Department of Health will be gathering information on both chronic illnesses and environmental problems to create a database that could help determine to what degree environmental toxins contribute to diseases such as asthma, cancer and birth defects.
Pennsylvania's new program will be one of the building blocks in the National Environmental Public Health Tracking (Surveillance) System, which public health officials say could also provide early warning of a biological or chemical terrorist attack.
The Health Department announced this week it had received a $595,614 grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the first year of the three-year project.
"We are going to be working very closely with the Department of Environmental Protection to coordinate much of the information they collect from all the environmental testing they do," said department spokesman Richard McGarvey. "We will start matching that up with information we receive on diseases in the state to see if there are any patterns, anything that says there are environmental connections with disease."
Currently there is no nationwide system that tracks chronic, as opposed to infectious, diseases, and tries to link them to environmental exposures, said Morgan Plant, the Pennsylvania coordinator for the Trust for America's Health, a public health advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
"This is the first federal money that has been available for this," she said. "We are one of the first states to get funded."
The trust is connected with a nonprofit group that last year created an online mapping system called Health-Track. The system combined data from the National Cancer Institute on mortality rates for cancers and the Environmental Protection Agency on hazardous air pollutants and chemical releases. The information is available at the trust's Web site www.healthyamericans.org.
Earlier this year, the state Health Department received $227,533 from the CDC for the first year of a two-year project to plan state biomonitoring programs to help prevent disease resulting from exposure to toxic substances.
The term "biomonitoring" refers to assessing people for exposure to toxins by testing blood, urine and saliva.
Christopher Snowbeck can be reached at csnowbeck@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2625.
E-mail this story 
