Abstract
Background
The World Health Organization and the European Union have set among their priority objectives the improvement of environmental quality and health, aiming to prevent environment-induced diseases. This requires the nationwide availability of reliable indicators of environmental quality and of epidemiological data. In Italy, the National Prevention Plan 2020-2025 aims to implement guidelines and actions to provide tools to facilitate the integration and synergy between the National Health System and the National System for Health Prevention from environmental-related health risks. Within this framework, the Integrated Database for Environment And Health (IDEAH) project aims at developing an online platform to collect and integrate the data related to environmental health nationwide, thus offering a data lakehouse architecture for supporting the achievement of such goals.
Materials and methods
We systematically investigated multiple sources of environmental factors, their characteristics and quality, looking also at their time coverage, spatial resolution, and validity. Similarly, we assessed the availability and completeness of national data flows about health endpoints potentially linked to environmental factors, including their spatial and time coverage, validity, and privacy constraints. We assigned a priority rating to exposures and outcomes of high relevance to identify the relation between the environment and health risks.
Results and conclusions
We identified and prioritized over 40 sources of environmental exposures, covering both terrestrial and satellite indicators related to air and soil pollution, land use, and other environmental factors. We also mapped a large number of national datasets potentially related to environmental health endpoints, including reproductive health outcomes, mortality and morbidity data, and hospital admissions. Assessment of data validity, priority and suitability for inclusion in the IDEAH platform, is ongoing.
Key messages
• Collecting, validating and integrating multiple data flows related to environmental quality and environmental health is a primary public health goal.
• The Italian Integrated Database for Environment And Health – IDEAH aims at identifying and combining nationwide data of terrestrial and satellite environmental quality, and health endpoints.