NCEH in
Partnership With
Mississippi
The National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH) is part of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). NCEH’s work
focuses on three program areas: identifying environmental hazards,
measuring exposure to environmental chemicals, and preventing
health effects that result from environmental hazards. NCEH has
approximately 450 employees and a budget for 2004 of approximately
$189 million; its mission is to promote health and quality of life
by preventing or controlling diseases and deaths that result from
interactions between people and their environment.
NCEH and partners in Mississippi collaborate on a variety
of environmental health projects throughout the state. In
fiscal years 2000–2004, NCEH awarded more than $830,000
in direct funds and services to Mississippi for various projects.
These projects include activities related to asthma and pesticide
exposures. In addition, Mississippi benefits from national-level
prevention and response activities conducted by NCEH or
NCEH-funded partners.
Identifying Environmental Hazards
NCEH identifies, investigates, and tracks environmental hazards
and their effects on people’s health. Following are examples of
such activities that NCEH conducted or supported in Mississippi.
Asthma
- Controlling Asthma from a
Public Health Perspective—NCEH is funding the Mississippi
Department of Health to create a statewide asthma-control
plan that the department and its partners can implement. This
plan will include tracking, science-based asthma interventions,
and a partnership of state entities. Funding began in fiscal
year 2003 and continues through fiscal year 2005.
- Inner-City Asthma
Intervention—NCEH is funding the Jackson-Hinds
Comprehensive Health Center to provide inner-city families
with asthma education and individualized asthma-control plans.
The Inner-City Asthma Intervention program is based on the
National Cooperative Inner-City Asthma Study (NCICAS), a
multifaceted, multimodal intervention to address a range of
problems that affect children who have asthma, and their
families. NCICAS demonstrated that an individually tailored
intervention carried out by masters-level social workers trained
in asthma management can reduce asthma symptoms among children
in the inner city. This program targets children 6 to 12 years
of age of low socioeconomic status who live in urban areas and
have moderate to severe asthma. Funding began in fiscal year
2001 and continues through fiscal year 2005.
Environmental Public Health Studies
Projects
- Pesticide Exposure after
Spraying for West Nile Virus in 2002—To evaluate the risk
from exposure to pesticides used in public health spraying to
control West Nile virus, NCEH assessed human exposure to
mosquito-control pesticides applied to control the mosquito
vector of West Nile virus in Mississippi. The NCEH
laboratory compared urinary levels of permethrin metabolites in
people living in areas that were sprayed for mosquitoes with
levels in people living in areas that were not sprayed for
mosquitoes. Results showed that the study population exposed to
mosquito-control pesticides had the same level of pesticides as
the population that was not exposed to pesticides.
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Measuring Exposure to Environmental
Chemicals
NCEH measures environmental
chemicals in people to determine how to protect people and improve
their health. Following are examples of such activities that NCEH
conducted or supported in Mississippi.
Funding
- Antiterrorism Funding to
Increase State Chemical Laboratory Capacity—In fiscal year
2003, CDC provided more than $1.1 million to Mississippi
to help the state expand its chemical laboratory capacity to
prepare for and respond to chemical-terrorism incidents and
other chemical emergencies. This program expansion will allow
full participation of chemical-terrorism response laboratories
in the Laboratory Response Network. NCEH has begun to fund
laboratory development and the purchase of state-of-the-art
equipment in Mississippi’s state public health laboratory in
support of developing a network of chemical laboratories and of
transferring technology that will measure chemical agents.
Services
- Helping State Public Health
Laboratories Respond to Chemical Terrorism—NCEH is working
with Mississippi’s public health laboratory to prepare
state laboratory scientists to measure chemical terrorism agents
or their metabolites in individuals’ blood or urine. NCEH is
transferring analytic methods for measuring chemical-terrorism
agents (including cyanide-based compounds and other chemicals)
to Mississippi. In addition, NCEH instituted a
proficiency-testing program to measure the compatibility of the
state’s analytic results with results from the NCEH laboratory.
- Blood Lead Laboratory
Reference System (BLLRS)—Three laboratories in Mississippi
participate in NCEH’s standardization program to improve the
overall quality of laboratory measurements of blood lead levels.
This program helps laboratories nationwide evaluate their
performance on these critical laboratory tests. NCEH provides
BLLRS materials to the laboratories four times a year without
charge.
- Newborn Screening
Quality-Assurance Program—NCEH provided proficiency-testing
services and dried-blood-spot, quality-control materials to
monitor and help assure the quality of screening program
operations for newborns in Mississippi. The importance of
accurate screening tests for genetic metabolic diseases cannot
be overestimated. Testing of blood spots collected from newborns
is mandated by law in almost every state to promote early
intervention that can prevent mental retardation, severe
illness, and premature death.
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Preventing Health Effects That Result
from Environmental Hazards
NCEH promotes safe environmental
public health practices to minimize exposure to environmental
hazards and prevent adverse health effects. Prevention of
childhood lead poisoning is an example of such activities.
Although NCEH has not recently conducted or supported any such
activities in Mississippi, we continue to look for
opportunities to provide technical assistance to the state in
matters of preventing childhood lead poisoning.
Resources
NCEH develops materials that
public health professionals, medical-care providers, emergency
responders, decision makers, and the public can use to identify
and track environmental hazards that threaten human health and to
prevent or mitigate exposure to those hazards. NCEH’s resources
cover a range of environmental public health issues, including air
pollution and respiratory health (e.g., asthma, carbon monoxide
poisoning, and mold exposures), biomonitoring to determine whether
selected chemicals in the environment get into people and how
much, childhood lead poisoning, emergency preparedness for and
response to chemicals and radiation, environmental health
services, environmental public health tracking, international
emergency and refugee health, laboratory sciences as applied to
environmental health, radiation studies, safe disposal of chemical
weapons, specific health studies, vessel sanitation, and veterans’
health.
For more information about NCEH programs, activities, and
publications as well as other resources, contact the NCEH Health
Line toll-free at 1-888-232-6789, e-mail NCEHinfo@cdc.gov, or
visit the NCEH Web site at
www.cdc.gov/nceh.
June 2004
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