Washington

Moves are under way to transform the patchy and underfunded system with which US public-health authorities track chronic diseases and their causes.

Plans to upgrade the system were discussed last week at a meeting held at the Institute of Medicine in Washington DC. Delegates have high hopes for the safe passage of the Nationwide Health Tracking Act, which was introduced to Congress last month by Senators Hillary Clinton (Democrat, New York) and Harry Reid (Democrat, Nevada). It advocates spending $270 million on a new nationwide environmental-health tracking system to integrate local, state and federal public-health schemes, and is likely to attract bipartisan support. US environmental-health activities are currently split between dozens of agencies.

Chronic diseases such as cancer and asthma are leading causes of death in the United States. “Rising rates of chronic disease require us to act now,” Clinton told the meeting.

The need to upgrade the monitoring network was raised in 2000 in a report by the Pew Environmental Health Commission, a public-health think-tank based at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Monitoring schemes received $30 million for the current fiscal year, but experts say that a successful nationwide system would need the larger sum proposed in the Clinton–Reid bill.

The bill proposes establishing five biomedical monitoring laboratories and five environmental-health centres of excellence. The network could also tap into expertise at the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Geological Survey. The latter, for example, already uses remote-sensing satellites to track dust storms that transport heavy metals, pathogens and pesticides.

→ http://pewenvirohealth.jhsph.edu