By Barbara Kessler

For those who are frustrated by the vast dispersed array of information on environmental threats to our health, a website assembled by the Centers for Disease Control may offer some relief.

The National Environmental Health Public Tracking Network aims to help us connect to information about the environmental causes of disease, such as indoor and outdoor air pollution and chemicals that creep into our lives in the air, on food and household products or through job-related exposures.

The site allows a person to, say, track Dallas County’s air quality, finding specifics such as the number of ozone-alert days or days that exceeded safe levels for particulate matter. This is technical stuff, but only modestly so. These are the measures for air quality used by the EPA, and anyone with asthma is probably already familiar with them.

What you can do about it is another question. The CDC site is not an advocacy or action-oriented enterprise. Its goal is to organize public information and to educate. It will tell you to watch out for nitrates in your drinking water; but it won’t advise that you stop using pesticides on the lawn because they contribute to the problem of groundwater being contaminated with nitrates.

The site does provide a glossary of terms that’s useful and it also delivers the current public health consensus on many topics. On nitrates, for instance, we learn that: “Researchers continue to explore if there are associations with long-term exposures to nitrates, including adverse reproductive effects and some cancers. The studies are not conclusive at this time, and health standards are focused on protecting infants.”

It helpfully corrals issues into their own sections: “Environments” are divided into three areas of interest Home, Outdoor and Water; and “Health Effects” into seven categories that people may want to pursue, including “Cancer,”  “Heart Attacks” and “Birth Defects.”  Each category contains primers on key topics and details the role of environmental hazards.

We find out, for instance, that aside from smoking, exposure to asbestos, chromium, polycyclic aromatic compounds, vinyl chloride and radon gas can raise one’s risk of lung cancer. This information dispels the notion that smoking is the only lung cancer trigger. The lung cancer synopsis also reminds us that eating a range of fruits and vegetables can be protective against this leading fatal disease.

But we have to go elsewhere to decipher “polycyclic aromatic compounds.” These chemicals, also known as “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon compounds” or PAHs, are found in pesticides, dyes and on grilled meats (which get coated with chemicals from unburned charcoal). Remember the grilled meat warnings of a few years back?

Similarly, we find out in “Health Effects” that consuming “disinfection byproducts” found in tap water (translation: the chlorine used to kill germs at the water treatment plant) “over many years” increases one’s “risk of developing bladder cancer”. We  are informed that we ingest these DBPs from tap water and also absorb them through our skin when we bathe. The CDC’s advises, however, not to worry because these chemicals are being more tightly regulated these days, and if your water exceeds safe limits temporarily “it does not mean that the people who consume the system’s water will become sick”.

Yet, the more one looks around the CDC site, the more worrisome our environment becomes. Grilled meat. Hot showers. A diet short in veggies and fruits. All these things can have health ramifications.

On the positive side, the CDC rounds this all up in one easy-to-use website.

But the government agency, in its effort to serve all masters and remain faithful to the wide consensus, wades in only so deep. It is a launching pad, validating our worries and clarifying definitions about environmental hazards, but leaving us needing more information in order to prioritize our personal health plan of action.

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