The Massachusetts Department of Public Health, in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, initiated a 3-year statewide project for the routine surveillance of asthma in children using school health records as the primary data source. School district nurse leaders received electronic data reporting forms requesting the number of children with asthma by grade and gender for schools serving grades kindergarten (K) through 8. Verification efforts from an earlier community-level study comparing a select number of school health records with primary care provider records demonstrated a high level of agreement (i.e., > 95%). First-year surveillance targeted approximately one-half (
n = 958 schools) of all Massachusetts's K-8 schools. About 78% of targeted school districts participated, and 70% of the targeted schools submitted complete asthma data. School nurse-reported asthma prevalence was as high as 30.8% for schools, with a mean of 9.2%. School-based asthma surveillance has been demonstrated to be a reliable and cost-effective method of tracking disease through use of an existing and enhanced reporting structure.
Key words: environmental public health tracking, epidemiology, indoor air quality, pediatric asthma, prevalence, school health, surveillance.
Environ Health Perspect 112: 1424-1427 (2004). [Online 3 August 2004]
This article is part of the mini-monograph "National Environmental Public Health Tracking," which is sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Address correspondence to R.S. Knorr, Massachusetts Department of Public Health, 250 Washington St., 7th Floor, Boston, MA 02108 USA. Telephone: (617) 624-5757. Fax: (617) 624-5777. E-mail: robert.knorr@dph.state.ma.us
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health thanks school nurses, the Pediatric Asthma Surveillance Advisory Committee, and the staff of the Department's Bureau of Family and Community Health who collaborated on this project.
This project is funded through cooperative agreement u50/ccu122451-02 from CDC, National Center for Environmental Health, Environmental Public Health Tracking Program.
This article was supported by an environmental public health tracking cooperative agreement from CDC. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of CDC.
The authors declare they have no competing financial interests.
Received 1 April 2004; accepted 3 August 2004.
