ESRI Geomedicine: Online Map Resource for Environmental Health

July 7, 2010

Environmental health focuses on exposures that happen in geographic places over time — and people tend to move from one place to another over the course of their lifetime.

GIS software company ESRI offers a free interactive online resource to help Americans determine the cumulative environmental health risks they face.

Users enter places where they lived for more than two years at a time, and the site generates a personalized "place history" pdf report detailing local heart attack rate and nearby toxic chemicals for each location. Unfortunately you don't get to specify the number of years per place, and cumulative lifetime risk data is not offered. But it's a starting point.

You also can generate shareable maps showing toxic and heart attack information for places where you've lived.

Data sources: The Dartmouth Atlas Project, EPA Toxics Release Inventory, and the US National Library of Medicine

 
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