Analyze

“Since asthma surveillance data were not available at the census tract level for most of Louisiana, we estimated asthma burden using the inpatient discharge data available through LDH.”  (4)

“Case counts are not provided for CTs with a 2018 population of less than 800 to safeguard privacy.” (4)

“To minimize the need for suppression, inpatient discharge data was aggregated for the three most recent years available (2017–2019) and average annual crude rates were calculated for cases where asthma (ICD-10 code J45) was the primary diagnosis, as well as where asthma was any diagnosis.” (4)

“Spearman’s Rank Correlation was utilized to analyze the correlation between various social and environmental vulnerability factors, COVID-19 incidence, and the measures of asthma risk by CT.” (4)

“This was performed by first ranking the values in each dataset using RANK.AVG function in MS Excel 2016, followed by applying the PEARSON function to compare two datasets. Significance was set at alpha less than 0.05 (α < 0.05), with degrees of freedom (df) equal to two less than the total number of data points represented in both datasets” (4)

The research team works for the Section of Environmental Epidemiology and Toxicology, Office of Public Health, Louisiana Department of Health in Baton Rouge. Team members included Arundhati Bakshi; Shanon Soileau; Collete Stewart; Kate Friedman; Collete Maser; Alexis Williams; Kathleen Aubin; and Alicia Van Doren. 

Research for this documented was organized and implemented by the Louisiana Department of Health’s (LDH) Bureau of Family Health and Trepwise, a strategy consulting firm. More than 700 experts and community members participated.

Eexpert individuals and organizations referred to in this document include: Dr. Shawn Ginwright, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Coalition for Compassionate Schools (CCS), the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, and Dr. Denese Shervington, MD, MPH, an expert in public health and psychiatry at the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies. Dr. Shervington is focused on historical, intergenerational, interpersonal, and community trauma and healing practices.

The process of drawing the WHL State plan also included “Community Conversations,” an effort to engaged communities in drafting the plan (organized and facilitated by the Power Coalition of Equity and Justice from January 2023 to November 2023). During these conversations, participants expressed concerns about extractive research projects and lack of followup, as well as a desire for greater access to local and state government. When asked about the origins of trauma in their communities, participants “overwhelmingly cited the persistence of extreme concentrated poverty and pollution in neglected areas” (58).

Skylar W. Marvel1, John S. House2, Matthew Wheeler2, Kuncheng Song1, Yihui Zhou1, Fred A. Wright1,3, Weihsueh A. Chiu4, Ivan Rusyn4, Alison Motsinger-Reif2*, David M. Reif1*

Affiliations:

1 Bioinformatics Research Center, Department of Biological Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA.

2 Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, NC, 27709, USA.

3 Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA

4 Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77845, USA.

CalEPA made this resource in order to create a “...holistic view of regulated activities statewide.”(CalEPA.2022).

ECHO is maintained by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Its purpose is to provide comprehensive information about all of the facilities regulated by the EPA. It is connected directly to the EPA's internal enforcement record system, so information is currrent.

Government Operations Agency aims to create a statewide open data portal intended to improve collaboration, expand transparency and lead to increased effectiveness. Despite the already existing open data portals hosted by several state agencies, this resource is made to host data from more than one agency.

The data is made available through the works of thousands of global collaborators. From NGOs, to activist, to researchers and various community organizations. The platforms mission is to create a space to make these globalized mobilizations more visible and collaborative. The goal and purpose of the EJ Atlas based on the founder and site:, “The EJ Atlas collects these stories of communities struggling for environmental justice from around the world. It aims to make these mobilization more visible, highlight claims and testimonies and to make the case for true corporate and state accountability for the injustices inflicted through their activities. It also attempts to serve as a virtual space for those working on EJ issues to get information, find other groups working on related issues, and increase the visibility of environmental conflicts.”

The California Student Health Index is made available by the California School-Based Alliance, a statewide organization on a mission to put health care in schools in California, which has lagged behind other states in supporting the establishment of school-based health SBHCs. The alliance aims to increase the number of SBHCs in California to 500 by 2030. There are currently 291 SBHCs in California (and over 10,000 K-12 schools). They are generally implemented by local districts, community organizations, healthcare providers, and school leaders rather than by state officials. Funding also typically follows a grassroots model (placing the burden on local communities), despite the funding California received ($30 million in 2011-2012) from the Affordable Care Act ACA to build and expand SBHCs (out of $200 million nationwide).

According to the California School-Based Alliance, SBHCs offer a step forward towards health and education equity by providing easy and safe access to healthcare, addressing physical, mental, social, and emotional health, and offering integrated healthcare through coordination between schools and community health care providers. The establishment of SBHCs has been recommended by the Center for Disease Control’s Community Preventative Services Task Force based on evidence that they improve educational outcomes for low-income populations and generally promote health equity.

The Student Health Index is intended to support these goals by providing a quantitative analytical tool that supports statewide advocacy to increase and maintain the number of SBHCs, build awareness of the interrelations between health and education, and to provide access to comparative tools for parsing publicly available local data in ways that can help communities and stakeholders identify opportunities to improve health care access in schools.

This was developed in 1988 by personnel from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) within the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) with funding from the Belgian government and the World Health Organization (WHO), this data source aims to provide free open access information for users affiliated with academic organizations, non-profits, and international public organizations looking to gain understanding on the distribution  of disaster occurrences around the globe.