Key Concepts About the Public Health Uses of the NHANES Environmental Chemical Data
Many agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal departments, as well as, a wide range of researchers are major users of NHANES environmental chemical data. The National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals discusses the public health uses of environmental chemical data. Some examples of public health uses are as follows:
-
Identifying and quantifying environmental chemicals in
the human body;
- Tracking
trends in exposure by various demographic
characteristics;
-
Providing baseline or reference data for smaller
community based studies of environmental exposure;
- Helping
to set priorities for the examination of risk factors
for exposure;
- Evaluating association between exposure and health endpoints; and
- Tracking
progress to achieve national environmental health
objectives.
