Background: To capture the impacts of environmental stressors, environmental indices like the Air Quality Index, Toxic Release Inventory and Environmental Quality Index have been used to investigate environmental quality and its association with public health issues. However, past studies often rely on relatively small sample sizes, and they have typically not adjusted for important individual-level disease risk factors. Objective: We aim to estimate associations between existing environmental indices and asthma prevalence over a large population and multiple years. Methods: Based on data availability, we assessed the predictive capability of these indices for prevalent asthma across U.S. counties from 2003 to 2012. We gathered asthma data from the U.S. CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System by county and used multivariable weighted logistic regression models to estimate the associations between the environmental indices and asthma, adjusting for individual factors such as smoking, income level, and obesity. Results: Environmental indices showed little to no correlation with one another and with prevalent asthma over time. Associations of environmental indices with prevalent asthma were very weak; whereas individual factors were more substantially associated with prevalent asthma. Significance: Our study suggests that an improved environmental index is needed to predict population-level asthma prevalence.

US Census Bureau data was matched to estimated cancer risk by US EPA from 2011 to 2018 to explore environmental justice on a national level with census tract resolution for a wide range of airborne toxins. Spearman correlations showed modest associations between various socio-demographic status factors and estimated cancer risk. Multiple linear regressions analyses showed increases in the numbers of minorities relative to White individuals were positively associated with increased estimated cancer risk in urban areas (p <0.05), but only for high proportions of Blacks in suburban and rural areas. Urban tracts suffer from highest estimated cancer risks were concentrated among the communities with population of higher density of minority and lack of education. While in general environmental justice seems improved across the examined years, equity is far from achieved and future work in identifying the sources of environmental injustice could help in achieving a more just environment.