Editorial: Better data on health saves lives

Tuesday, March 19, 2002 | 8:56 a.m.

Seven years ago Congress directed the Department of Energy to assess the long-term health of the department's former employees, thousands of whom had worked in dangerous conditions. Since that time about 15,000 people, including former employees at the Nevada Test Site, have undergone health screenings across the nation. A recent progress report by the department noted that a large percentage of the workers had developed significant health problems due to their work.

It's one thing to take down information to see if ex-workers have become ill. It's another thing to turn the data into something more meaningful, so that the information can help doctors treat patients now. The DOE program is getting an assist in this regard from researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. As the Sun's Jennifer Knight reported Monday, a computerized medical archiving project under way at UNLV could result in Nevada being the nation's warehouse for electronically stored medical records of DOE employees. A centralized, easy-to-access computer database would save crucial time so that doctors could make a diagnosis faster -- and not waste time tracking down paper medical records and industrial reports scattered across the country.

It is reassuring that former DOE employees' illnesses are being tracked, but more work could be done elsewhere to place a greater emphasis on environmental links to illnesses and diseases. The Trust for America's Health, a public interest group, has advocated a nationwide database to track chronic diseases so their causes can be determined. The United States tracks infectious diseases, the public health group notes, but there isn't a similar program in place for tracking illnesses such as asthma, cancer and birth defects, illnesses that sometimes can be tied to environmental causes. That means it can take a long time for doctors and health officials to realize how severe and widespread a medical problem may be, as was the case with the still unexplained childhood leukemia cluster in the Northern Nevada town of Fallon.

Taking a step in the right direction, a few months ago Congress set aside $17.5 million to start a nationwide tracking effort, a beginning to what hopefully will offer a better insight into what causes inexplicable chronic diseases. Understanding what causes diseases also is essential to preventive care, which not only cuts medical costs but also saves lives.