Library Guides: Public Health: Environmental Health

Need Mobile?

Heat Safety Tool (mobile app) Available in English and Spanish, the App allows workers and supervisors to calculate the heat index for their worksite, and, based on the heat index, displays a risk level to outdoor workers. Then, with a simple "click," you can get reminders about the protective measures that should be taken at that risk level to protect workers from heat-related illness-reminders about drinking enough fluids, scheduling rest breaks, planning for and knowing what to do in an emergency, adjusting work operations, gradually building up the workload for new workers, training on heat illness signs and symptoms, and monitoring each other for signs and symptoms of heat-related illness.
EPA AIRNow Every day the Air Quality Index (AQI) tells you how clean or polluted your outdoor air is, along with associated health effects that may be of concern. The AQI translates air quality data into numbers and colors that help people understand when to take action to protect their health.You can get the AQI in different ways. Available for our mobile device.

Free Resources Online

CDC: Drinking Water
Drinking water comes from a variety of sources including public water systems, private wells, or bottled water. Ensuring safe and healthy drinking water may be as simple as turning on the tap from an EPA-regulated public water system. Other water sources may need a water filter, a check on water fluoridation, or an inspection to ensure a septic tank is not too close to a private well. It is important to know where drinking water comes from, how it’s been treated, and if it's safe to drink.
CDC’s Healthy Community Design Initiative : Designing and Building Healthy Places
The way we design and build our communities can affect our physical and mental health. Healthy community design integrates evidence-based health strategies into community planning, transportation, and land-use decisions. CDC’s Healthy Community Design Initiative is part of the National Center for Environmental Health's Division of Emergency and Environmental Health Services.
EJSCREEN
"EJSCREEN is an environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides EPA with a nationally consistent dataset and approach for combining environmental and demographic indicators. EJSCREEN users choose a geographic area; the tool then provides demographic and environmental information for that area. All of the EJSCREEN indicators are publicly-available data. EJSCREEN simply provides a way to display this information and includes a method for combining environmental and demographic indicators into EJ indexes. "
HealthyPeople.gov: Environmental Health
Healthy People 2030 focuses on reducing people’s exposure to harmful pollutants in air, water, soil, food, and materials in homes and workplaces.
National Academies Press: Environmental Health Publications
Free reports on a variety of environmental health issues. You may need to create a free account to download the pdf.
World Health Organization: Climate change and human health
Climate change is a significant and emerging threat to public health, and changes the way we must look at protecting vulnerable populations

Research

What's the latest research in environmental health? the Library has specialized article databases to help you keep up to date.

Global Health This link opens in a new window
Global Health is a public health database that provides information on international health, biomedical life sciences, non-communicable diseases, public health nutrition, food safety and hygiene, and much more. This database contains more than 1.2 million records dating back to 1973.
UNLIMITED ACCESS DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC; otherwise the libraries subscription is for 2 Simultaneous Users. Please log off when you are done searching as a courtesy to others.
GreenFILE This link opens in a new window
GreenFILE offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. The database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 384,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 4,700 records.