Environmental Public Health and Emergency Response

To bring public health and epidemiologic principles together to identify, clarify, and reduce the impact of complex environmental threats, including terrorist threats and natural disasters, on populations, domestic and foreign. These programs and activities focus on safeguarding the health of people from environmental threats; providing leadership in the use of environmental health sciences-including environmental epidemiology, environmental sanitation, and laboratory sciences-to protect public health; and responding to issues and sharing solutions to environmental health problems worldwide. To accomplish the above, the CDC: (1) conducts surveillance and investigations that increase the knowledge about the relation between human health and environmental threats; (2) uses this knowledge to develop national public health programs and policies to prevent or control public health problems; (3) plans, prepares, and responds to emergencies, including terrorist threats, technologic accidents, and natural disasters; (4) provides direct service delivery to partners engaged in environmental health services such as food, safety, rodent control, water quality, and sanitation; (5) develops and applies laboratory science to prevent disease and death caused by exposure to environmental chemicals and to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of selected chronic diseases; (6) conducts Biomonitoring to assess individual human exposure to environmental chemicals by measuring them in human specimens (e.g. blood and urine); and, (7) conducts activities on emerging environmental threats such as climate change and the built environment.