Summary

Description

The US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL) in the Environmental Public Health Division (EPHD) is currently engaged in research aimed at developing a measure that estimates overall environmental quality at the county level for the United States. This work is being conducted as an effort to learn more about how various environmental factors simultaneously contribute to health disparities in low-income and minority populations, and to better estimate the total environmental and social context to which humans are exposed. This dataset contains the finalized transformed variables chosen to represent the Air, Water, Land, Built, and Sociodemographic Domains of the total environment. Six criteria air pollutants and 81 hazardous air pollutants are included in this dataset. Data sources are the EPA's Air Quality system (http://www.epa.gov/ttn/airs/airsaqs/) and the National-scale Air Toxics Assessment (http://www.epa.gov/nata/). Variables are average pollutant concentrations or emissions for 2000-2005 at the county level for all counties in the United States. Data on water impairment, waste permits, beach closures, domestic water source, deposition for 9 pollutants, drought status, and 60 chemical contaminants. Data sources are the EPA's WATERS (Watershed Assessment, Tracking and Environmental ResultS) Database (http://www.epa.gov/waters/), the U.S. Geological Survey Estimates of Water Use in the U.S. for 2000 and 2005 (http://water.usgs.gov/watuse/), the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (http://nadp.sws.uiuc.edu/), the U.S. Drought Monitor Data (http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/), and the EPA's National Contaminant Occurrence Database (http://water.epa.gov/scitech/datait/databases/drink/ncod/databases-index.cfm). Variables are calculated for the time period from 2000-2005 at the county level for all counties in the United States. Data represents traffic safety, public transportation, road type, the business environment and public housing. Data sources are the Dun and Bradstreet North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes; Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER); Fatality Annual Reporting System (FARS); and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data. This dataset contains the finalized variables chosen to represent the sociodemographic domain of the total environment. Data represents socioeconomic and crime conditions. Data sources are the United States Census and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports. Variables are calculated for the time period from 2000-2005 at the county level for all counties in the United States.