Integrated data bases in environmental health applications
Increasingly, public attention is focusing on the health effects of environmental hazards including air pollution, radioactive and toxic wastes, and indoor radon. Typical exposures are at low levels, and have a geographic distribution that can be estimated a priori. In such cases, analysis of routinely collected health surveillance data can be faster, cheaper and more sensitive than specially designed case-control or cohort studies. The health data are linked by geographic location with independently collected census data and environmental exposure data. The units of analysis are geographic areas rather than individuals; such data are known as ecologic data. In analyzing such data, rates calculated for individual subareas are not a suitable measure of risk. If the subareas are too small, stable rates cannot be calculated; if too large, geographic detail is lost. In either case one cannot easily describe trends which vary smoothly across adjacent subareas. We describe a preferred alternative, the mathematical technique of density equalizing map projections. Because ecologic data often cover broad areas and long time periods, the same data find repeated use in different applications. Comprehensive data files are generally too large and complex for commercial data base systems. Conventional analytical techniques are not generally valid for ecologic data. Below the county level, geographic data integration is a difficult task requiring the use of geographic base map files. For all these reasons it is cost effective to permanently integrate major ecologic data files in a publicly shared computing environment.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley Lab., CA (USA)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC03-76SF00098
- OSTI ID:
- 5883736
- Report Number(s):
- LBL-27436; CONF-8906198-1; ON: DE89016339
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Environmental databases workshop, San Antonio, TX, USA, 19 Jun 1989; Other Information: Portions of this document are illegible in microfiche products
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
DATA BASE MANAGEMENT
ECOLOGY
HEALTH HAZARDS
ENGINEERING
HAZARDS
MANAGEMENT
500100* - Environment
Atmospheric- Basic Studies- (-1989)
520100 - Environment
Aquatic- Basic Studies- (-1989)
990300 - Information Handling
510100 - Environment
Terrestrial- Basic Studies- (-1989)