The Comprehensive Assessment of Rural Health in Iowa (CARHI) was a project of the Iowa Department of Public Health, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the University of Iowa. The goal was to test a surveillance system that links health data and environmental contaminants data within a geographic information system (GIS). The system was to test the potential to evaluate relationships between environmental exposures and health outcomes.
An environmental database was created within a GIS system which was then transferred to the Iowa Department of Public Health. The CARHI team then developed and tested a privacy protection tool within the GIS system that will in the future allow the IDPH to collaborate on investigations into the relationship between environmental exposures and health outcomes. Although, developed for one county in Iowa, the CARHI project showed that it would be possible in the future to develop a GIS system for the whole state.
Research Publications:
Mazumdar, S; G Rushton, BJ Smith, D L Zimmerman, and KJ Donham. Geocoding accuracy and the recovery of relationships between environmental exposures and health. 2008. Int J Health Geogr.; 7:13. Open Access Full Text PDF
Zimmerman, DL; Fang, XM; Mazumdar, S. Spatial clustering of the failure to geocode and its implications for the detection of disease clustering . 2008. Statistics in Medicine, 27(21): 4254-4266. DOI: 10.1002/sim.3288
Zimmerman DL, Fang X, Mazumdar S, Rushton G. Modeling the probability distribution of positional errors incurred by
residential address geocoding. 2007. Int J Health Geogr.;6:1.
Open Access Full Text PDFRadon K, Schulze A, Ehrenstein V, van Strien RT, Praml G, Nowak D. Environmental exposure to confined animal feeding operations and respiratory health of neighboring residents. 2007. Epidemiology;18(3):300-8. PubMed PMID:17435437.