Tribal-state collaboration to build environmental public health tracking capacity in Wisconsin

Environmental public health tracking (EPHT) programs at the federal and state levels seek to increase the accessibility and availability of data on environmental hazards and exposures and the chronic diseases for which they are risk factors.  While these efforts have provided highly-useful data for local public health agencies and community-based public health partners, Tribal communities have not been a primary focus of EPHT activities to date.  To remedy this, state health departments in Wisconsin and Minnesota are collaborating with CDC and the Great Lakes Tribal Epidemiology Center to develop and implement pilot projects to increase the ability of Tribal health and environmental agencies to describe, summarize and disseminate EPHT data to identify health and environmental priorities and implement public health and environmental quality improvement actions.  Initial activities were focused on identifying Tribes and urban Indian communities interested in collaboration and conducting informal inventories of relevant health and environmental data.  From these efforts, a Wisconsin Tribe was identified and a list of potential project outcomes that would address existing and future Tribal needs was developed.  These include data summaries to augment community health assessment activities, baseline data to evaluate longitudinal health and environmental changes related to regional resource extraction proposals, and development of data on ecological indicators to evaluate continued viability of local food sources.  It is hoped and expected that these outcomes will support ongoing, sustainable collection and dissemination of EPHT data within and among Tribes within the Great Lakes region to support health and environmental quality assessments and improvements.