Rapid Assessment and Characterization of Environmental Risks - RACER

Public health officials are often required to address clusters or outbreaks of disease thought to be linked to an environmental exposure. Relatively little research has focused on the extent to which inherent limitations of environmental investigations impact our ability to identify and characterize environmental risks, and few software tools are available to analyze risk over time from environmental exposure. Thus, it is difficult for health officials to quickly assess whether health tracking activities or a targeted investigation is warranted or feasible and convey these results to the concerned public. With the support of the University of Pittsburgh’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Network team, we have developed the RACER software tool (Rapid Assessment and Characterization of Environmental Risks) to provide this resource. The current internet-based version of RACER is run interactively and written in open-source code, allowing free and easy access to the program and its capabilities. Three commonly encountered environmental risk scenarios can be analyzed in RACER.  In Scenario 1, a source of environmental exposure is identified in a population along with estimates of the exposure-level health risks.  In Scenario 2, a number of health outcomes have been observed in a population over time in communities near a suspected source of environmental exposure. Scenario 3 addresses situations where a suspected source of environmental exposure exists, but the proportion of individuals exposed and the risks due to the exposure are unknown. For each scenario, RACER provides a wide range of statistical and epidemiological analyses for multiple exposure-related subgroups and over time, including observed and expected numbers of events, statistical power, sample size and minimum detectable relative risk. RACER is run interactively and provides both tabular and graphical output with supporting documentation. We will present a real-time computer demonstration of RACER to illustrate its many capabilities.