The environment is a major determinant of health. Locally, there are clear indications that the Pittsburgh region, once famous for having “cleaned up its act” as one of the most polluted places in the country, has been backsliding over the last decade or two in terms of certain aspects of environmental health, including, for example, air quality and urban sprawl. Despite these indications, certain key questions remain difficult to answer. For example, what is the current local burden of disease related to various environmental factors? How does this burden of disease in the Pittsburgh region compare to that seen in other parts of the country? How is it changing over time? Do certain communities in our region bear more of this burden than others? How can policy-makers, organizations and communities prioritize local environmental health problems so as to act most effectively to solve them?

Before we can begin to try to answer these questions, or even to know whether they are in fact answerable, it is first advisable to examine the types and quality of existing environmental health data. If available, such data would certainly be useful, for example, in helping make decisions related to personal actions, planning research agendas, program design, policy-making, and funding strategies. This report lays the groundwork for an understanding of the data and data gaps related to local environmental health, so as to allow such decision-making to be better informed by the available data, as well as to prioritize areas where efforts to gather better data are most needed. Our goal with this report in its present form is to create the foundation for a consolidated information inventory and data needs assessment that will serve the following purposes for environmental health researchers, citizens, funders and policy makers in the Pittsburgh region:

·         Provide an overview of several areas of environmental health information in one place, along with an understanding of their pertinence and interconnectedness

·         Illustrate the large volume of information that is already available, and where much of it can be obtained, to lessen information seeking time and duplication of effort

·         Describe some of the major strengths and weaknesses of existing information

·         Outline some of the major gaps in information, so that we collectively know where the greatest efforts will be needed

·         Highlight related data compilation, linkage and analysis endeavors, so that organizations may share resources and avoid duplication of efforts

·         Provide an understanding of some of the political/systemic barriers to furthering the environmental health data base, so that future endeavors take such barriers into consideration

·         Illustrate the “real life” connection to environmental health issues via case studies of successful and unsuccessful attempts to obtain and utilize environmental health data for specific purposes