Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is an approach to assessing the health impacts of policies, plans, and projects using a variety of quantitative, qualitative and participatory techniques, in order to help decision-makers make more informed choices and promote healthy initiatives. One major benefit to using this approach is that investigators can record local observations where community-level data is difficult to find.
Outbreaks and Emerging Issues
Environmental hazards, intentional and man-made emergencies, and infectious disease outbreaks that pose a threat to public health.
Background
Rural agricultural areas in the United States are key regions for influenza surveillance in wild and domesticated animals such as pigs and birds. Public health and veterinary agencies regularly monitor birds and swine for influenza strains that could cause agricultural harm or potential human illness. Because many immigrants and refugees live near or work at farms and animal processing plants, protecting their health and integrating them into flu surveillance and emergency response is a public health priority.
The issue(s)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that across the globe heat waves will likely become stronger and longer, while heavy precipitation events will become more frequent. In order to make appropriate public health adaptations, local decision makers need tools that aggregate health, weather, and environmental data. By overlaying health and vulnerability metrics on environmental and policy data a local level, officials will better understand the variations between location and risk, thus identifying target communities for interventions.
Mosquitoes carrying the dengue fever virus are slowly reemerging in the southern United States. Dengue fever occurs when an individual becomes infected by one of four virus serotypes, at which point the individual receives lifetime immunity to the specific serotype. Additional infections by other serotypes increase an individual’s risk of contracting dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) and dengue shock syndrome (DSS), more severe forms of the disease.
