Winter 2006 Volume 71, Number 4
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Environment and Health Mapping Website Launched
By Judy Blaine, blaine@silentspring.org

A newly developed web-based mapping tool known as the MassHEIS, developed at the Silent Spring Institute with funding from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), allows visitors to explore how sources of pollution, indicators of environmental quality, and certain health outcomes vary across Massachusetts. It also helps visitors to examine relationships among these factors, such as whether childhood cancers are highest in areas with the most industrial facilities.

Users can browse and query data sets, map health and environmental factors, and look at related information through hot links to websites such as those of EPA, National Library of Medicine, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. MassHEIS is unique in combining health, demographic, and environmental databases in one web-based tool. This powerful tool provides valuable access to information for residents who want to find out more about the potential health hazards in their town or region. For example, air quality measures and transportation corridors can be mapped along with town-level data on asthma hospitalizations. In addition to highlighting areas of Massachusetts where health or environmental problems are most significant, the mapping technology is a powerful tool in assessing areas of environmental injustice -- the uneven distribution of environmental burdens.

Many women living with breast cancer are interested in learning about historical rates of breast cancer and other cancers in towns where they have previously lived. This tool allows them to do that. It also provides important geographical information on asthma and air pollution, polluting facilities, incidence rates for numerous cancers, and pesticide use. Users can look at pre-existing maps or build their own to examine the relationships among any of these factors.

Researchers will find this tool valuable for gaining access to important underlying databases developed in the Institute’s Cape Cod Breast Cancer and Environment Study and datasets can be directly loaded into mapping software applications, such as ArcMap. For example, Silent Spring Institute mapped locations of wide-area pesticide spraying on the Cape as far back as 1955.

To explore the new tool, please visit http://www.silentspring.org

Silent Spring Institute’s geographic information system for the Cape Cod Breast Cancer and Environment study won an Environmental Merit Award from US EPA and the New Technology Award of the Environmental Business Council of New England. Silent Spring Institute is a non-profit research organization dedicated to studying the environment’s effect on women’s health, with an emphasis on breast cancer.

For more information, contact Judy Blaine at Silent Spring Institute:
blaine@silentspring.org or 617-332-4288, ext. 11.

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