Drinking Water and Environmental Public Health Tracking: Assessing Statewide and Local Water Quality Data Sources

Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) is the ongoing collection, integration, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of data from environmental hazard monitoring, and human exposure and health effects surveillance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in a cooperative agreement with 17 state and local health departments, is leading the initiative to build a national tracking network by drawing on expertise from federal, state and local agencies. As part of this effort, a national workgroup was formed to identify appropriate drinking water quality data and measures for inclusion in the tracking network. In order to identify current gaps in data and information, and assess the feasibility of developing measures of drinking water quality, the EPHT drinking water workgroup assessed existing statewide and local water quality data sources. This assessment documented the availability and quality of centralized and electronic water quality and water system data that could be used to generate useful, nationally consistent measures for tracking spatial and temporal trends in drinking water quality. The results indicate that the data elements needed to generate public health based measures are centrally reported to the state agency responsible for regulating public water supplies, and are available in electronic format to EPHT programs. The most crucial data gap is the lack of information on the geographic extent and spatial distribution of water systems, making the linkage of these data with population based census estimates and other health effect data virtually impossible. The entire assessment process benefited EPHT as it provided a better understanding of the data available from different states and the feasibility to generate measures to assess drinking water quality.