Population health environmental indicators: ecologic monitoring of environment-related health and disease trends

Abstract

Background: Current State of the Environment (SoE) reporting focuses primarily on indicators directly related to the physical environment such as climate, and air, water and soil quality. As the environment has both direct and indirect effects on human health, an opportunity exists to include environment-related human disease indicators as an SoE indicator theme.

Objective: To develop a set of population health environmental indicators (PHEIs, phi s) that can illustrate environment-related disease (ERD) trends at the population level.

Methods: A literature review was conducted on environmental health monitoring and the current knowledge of environmental effects on human health. Key PHEIs were identified and routine health data collections accessed and analysed to illustrate temporal and geographic trends.

Results: Diseases with an environmental aetiology are tabulated and examples are given of the type and range of PHEIs that can be developed for an Australian geographic area.

Conclusions: Illustrating environmental degradation in terms of resultant human diseases is a potent tool for promoting environmental protection measures. This paper examines a range of PHEIs that may be used as indicators of both environmental disease and environmental quality.

Implications: PHEIs could be developed as a useful SoE indicator theme, and as a tool to help foster the convergence which is occurring between environmental health and public health fields.