What is EPHT?
Environmental Public Health Tracking, or EPHT, is the ongoing collection, integration, analysis, and interpretation of data about:
- environmental hazards
- exposure to environmental hazards
- health effects potentially related to environmental exposures.
Public health tracking is often referred to as surveillance. Oregon Tracking in partnership with CDC's National Environmental Public Health Tracking program creates a "one-stop shop" to look at different environmental health information with the goal of improving overall health.
Why is Oregon Tracking important?
Citizens, public health professionals, students, researchers and policy makers need access to current, relevant, and accurate information about environmental exposures and health outcomes to create individual, community, state, and national strategies. These strategies would help to reduce the burden of disease attributable to the environment.
What kind of information does the EPHT network and Oregon Tracking contain?
The EPHT network utilizes existing
- hazard
- exposure
- health effect data
Hazards include chemical agents, physical agents, biomechanical stressors, and biologic toxins that can be found in air, water, soil, food, and other environmental media.
Exposure tracking is the monitoring of individuals, communities, or population groups for the presence of an environmental agent.
Health effects track traditional public health surveillance efforts. Disease registries, vital statistics data, annual health surveys, and hospital discharge data.
Oregon Tracking continues to add information and data to the network based on the needs of stakeholders and available data sources. Some content in the National and State network portals overlap, but you will find some unique data sets with the Oregon Tracking network. 
Need more information?
You can contact any of the program staff. Program updates and environmental public health related news is shared routinely through social media pages (Facebook and Twitter) and the program's listserv.