The New England Asthma Regional Council
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The New England Asthma Regional Council
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Surveillance Publications Tracking
disease in America Chronic
Diseases are the leading cause of death in the U.S., yet the systems
in place to combat this major public health problem are woefully inadequate.
For example, more than half the states have no tracking and monitoring
of asthma, which afflicts 17 million Americans, including 5 million
children. Existing
efforts to gather information on asthma and other chronic diseases and
their potential environmental links are highly fragmented and inadequate
for collecting the kind of nationwide data that are needed to truly
understand how often, in what locations and why these diseases occur.
This information could also help to eventually prevent the incidence
of some of these diseases in the future. Lacking such information, it
is difficult for health care professionals, the public and government
officials to grasp the magnitude of the problems we face and how to
prevent them. Relevant
Action Step Items The
first two Action Steps articulated in ARC’s 12-point action plan
have to do with improving surveillance of asthma in the New England
states, coordinating efforts, and connecting the findings to environmental
conditions. The two steps are: Action
Item 1: The Council encourages every New England State to develop
an asthma surveillance program. States are encouraged to make the results
publicly available to allow for analyzing and comparing baseline asthma
rates, as well as development of a regional asthma estimate, and annual
updates. Action
Item 2: The Council will a) provide a forum for exchanging and strengthening
health, economic and environmental data relevant to asthma in the region
with a goal of creating more comparable data; b) work toward developing
pilot projects and research programs to answer specific, priority questions
by examining health and environmental data. A number of New England states have recently received (Fall 2002) Environmental Health Tracking Grants from the CDC and a number of them have also received Occupational Asthma Surveillance Grants from NIOSH. ARC will be endeavoring to bring together the Principle Investigators of these surveillance systems in each of the states to facilitate communication and coordination. Asthma in New EnglandOne
of ARC’s goals is to build a robust asthma surveillance system
across New England to better understand how the disease is influenced
by outdoor and indoor air quality. In order to understand environmental
influences, however, we first need to determine how, when and where
asthma manifests itself across the entire region, because air pollution
has no prescribed political or geographic boundaries. However individual
states have historically defined and collected asthma data differently,
so comparisons made on a state-by-state basis have been difficult to
do. Collecting uniform data across the region is a first step towards
a goal of analyzing information in a consistent manner so that prevalence
comparisons can be studied in meaningful ways and connections to the
environment can be researched, understood and addressed. To better understand the burden of asthma in the region, ARC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Region I (New England) convened public health surveillance professionals from the six New England states to investigate and analyze asthma rates in a collective fashion, for both adults and children. They utilized the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) in 2001, which is a telephone survey of randomly selected non-institutionalized adults conducted in all 50 states and some territories. This report summarizes the results of the 2001 BRFSS survey on current adult asthma in the six New England states. Adult Asthma in New England: A Report by ARC A report summarizing current adult asthma rates in New England based on the 2001 BRFSS data was released in May 2003. Child Asthma in New England: A Report by ARC A report summarizing lifetime and current child asthma rates in New England based on a special childhood asthma module added to the 2001 BRFSS data was released in February 2004. The Surveillance Committee members have agreed to explore developing a coordinated school based pediatric asthma surveillance systems in the six states. ARC hired the Tellus Institute of Boston to examine what progress has been made to date. The results of the examination are contained in a report entitled, School Based Asthma Surveillance in New England. Following this report, ARC convened a meeting on December 9, 2003 of those interested in furtherexploring the opportunities and challenges involved with developing a regional pediatric asthma surveillance system. The meeting highlights can be found here. After the meeting, phone interviews of Nurse Leaders in the six New England states were then conducted by Tellus to obtain further insights regarding the needs, the opportunities and barriers relevant to facilitating a regional asthma surveillance initiative, as well as to inquire about the types of data sources school nurses use to identify students with asthma. A summary of those interviews can be found here. Finally a Draft Strategy Document was developed to help ARC's Surveillance Committee consider options for moving a regional school-based asthma surveillance system forward. Using Medicaid Data to Track Asthma in New England: A Status Report by ARC Using Medicaid Data for Asthma Surveillance - The Michigan Experience Committee Activities Acting
Chair and DHHS Staff Staff
Committee Members
Regional Data
State Data
School
Nurse Resources Environmental
Concerns in the School Setting: for Nurses Missouri’s
School Nurse Asthma Manual Strengthening
the School Nurse Role in Environmental Conditions Web ResourcesCDC's Closing the Environmental Health Gap Keeping Track, Promoting Health-CDC Overview CDC National Childhood Asthma Trends, December 2006 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad381.pdf CDC's Online Environmental Public Health Tracking Course CDC's
Environmental Tracking Initiative" CDC's
Environmental Public Health Indicators National
Assn. of State School Nurse Consultants National
Asthma Estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) National
Asthma Programs and Contacts National
Surveillance Data about Asthma in Children Occupational
Asthma Surveillance from the Nat. Institutes of Occupational Safety
and Health Short of Breath: Our Lack of Response to the Growing Asthma Epidemic and the Need for Nationwide Tracking Trust for America's Health, July 2001 http://healthyamericans.org/reports/files/shortofbreath.pdf Surveillance
for Asthma, United States 1980-1999
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Asthma
Regional Council - The Medical Foundation - 622 Washington Street, 2nd
Floor - Dorchester, MA 02124 - 617-451-0049 x504
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