Human Biomonitoring and the Inspire Directive: Spatial Data as Link for Environment and Health Research

Abstract

Recently, there has been a rapid gain of interest in the availability, applicability, and integration of different types of spatial data for environment and health issues. The INSPIRE Directive (Directive 2007/2/EC) aims at providing better and easily accessible spatial information in Europe for the formulation and implementation of community policy on the environment by triggering the creation of a European spatial information infrastructure that delivers integrated spatial information services to potential users. Human biomonitoring (HBM) significantly contributes to the already existing data on environment and health because of its specific nature of providing information on the internal dose of chemicals rather than their mere presence in different environmental compartments. However, due to the intrinsic nature of HBM data, a number of issues need to be dealt with if HBM data are to be used to its full capacity in a geographic information systems (GIS) environment and within the INSPIRE directive. The current article highlights some of these issues, and discusses a number of options to improve the geographical relevance of HBM data for their optimal use within the INSPIRE Directive framework. The main aim of this publication is to illustrate that HBM has a significant contribution to make to the INSPIRE Directive, although some kind of data aggregation will be necessary to protect individual privacy. If HBM data wants to have a significant contribution to spatial information used to assist policymaking and on the surveillance or tracking of the direct or indirect impact of such policies, the HBM data need to be compatible with other data collected within the other themes of the INSPIRE Directive.

Musings on privacy issues in health research involving disaggregate geographic data about individuals

“…The biomedical and public health literature on geographic information systems (GIS) and spatio-temporal analyses features a large number of research papers mentioning or addressing location privacy, e.g., [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. A must-read paper (not specifically health-related) dating back to 1994 [29] shows how chronic privacy issues are in GIS research.…”

“…A must-read paper (not specifically health-related) dating back to 1994 [29] shows how chronic privacy issues are in GIS research. Some research papers identified privacy as a potential or actual issue of concern (e.g., in reproductive health research [18]; in birth defects surveillance and research [19]; in research relevant to policy on diet, physical activity, and weight [20]; in environmental health research [21]; and in health and social care planning [22]), while others went one step further by suggesting some comprehensive solutions (e.g., [23][24][25][26]), workarounds, or frameworks and principles of practice (e.g., [29]) to mitigate or resolve these privacy concerns.…”

Spatial Analytics Based on Confidential Data for Strategic Planning in Urban Health Departments

“…Accuracy in location, however, can lead to cases being identifiable, particularly in small spatial units [17]. The identifiability of cases has been noted as a potential or actual issue of concern in reproductive health [18], birth defects [19], diet [20], environmental health [21], social care planning [22], and geo-privacy studies [23]. The U.S. Privacy Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) [24] requires that disclosed health information be restricted to the minimum necessary to satisfy its intended purpose.…”

Approaches to integrated monitoring for environmental health impact assessment

“…• Multiple systematic tools for linking exposure, dose and health effect data, such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) [65], Bayesian belief networks (BBN) [66] and multiple lines and levels of evidence (MLLE) tools [67]. GIS links the indicators from environmental monitoring, biomonitoring and health surveillance in a visual way.…”

“…Each feature is linked to a position on the graphical image on a map and a record in an attributed table. Besides simply plotting environmental monitoring data and morbidity/mortality information on a map, GIS also offer important opportunities for interpolation or extrapolation of monitoring and modelling data [65]. MLLE is developed for epidemiological studies, human and ecological risk assessments [68,69].…”