Fact Sheet
TOXMAP: Environmental Health e-Maps
TOXMAP® (http://toxmap.nlm.nih.gov) is a Geographic Information System (GIS) from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) that uses maps of the United States to help users visually explore data from the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) (http://www.epa.gov/tri/) and Superfund Programs (http://www.epa.gov/superfund/).
Federal law requires facilities in certain industries, which manufacture, process, or use significant amounts of toxic chemicals, to report annually on their releases of these chemicals to the EPA TRI Program. Superfund sites are those throughout the United States and its territories which contain substances that are either designated as hazardous under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), or identified as such under other laws.
TOXMAP helps users create nationwide, regional, or local area maps showing where TRI chemicals are released on-site into the air, water, and ground. It also identifies the releasing facilities, color-codes release amounts for a single year or year range, and provides multi-year aggregate chemical release data and trends over time, starting with 1988. Maps can also show locations of Superfund sites on the National Priority List (NPL) (http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/npl), listing all chemical contaminants present at these sites.
Users can search the system by location (such as city, state, or ZIP code), chemical name, chemical name fragment, release medium, release amount, facility name and ID, and can filter results to those residing within a pre-defined or custom geographic region. Search results can be saved for use in other tools, and can also be viewed in Google Maps® and Google Earth®. TOXMAP also overlays map data such as US census population information, income figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and health data from the National Cancer Institute (http://www.cancer.gov/) and the National Center for Health Statistics (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/).
NLM has an extensive collection of toxicology and environmental health references (TOXLINE®), as well as a rich resource of data on hazardous chemical substances (HSDB®) in the TOXNET® databases (http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov). These resources are easily linked to/from the TOXMAP search results. The data shown in TOXMAP comes from:
- EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) - (http://www.epa.gov/tri)
- EPA's Superfund Program/CERCLA - (http://www.epa.gov/superfund/)
- Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB®) - (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/hsdbfs.html)
- TOXLINE® (Toxicology Bibliographic Information) - (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/toxlinfs.html)
- Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) -(http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/atsdrhome.html)
- National Atlas of the United States of America (USGS) - (http://www.nationalatlas.gov/)
- NCI's SEER*Stat Database - (http://www.seer.cancer.gov/)
- National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) - (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/)
TOXMAP is a project of the Specialized Information Services Division of the NLM and supports its mission of addressing toxicology and environmental health information needs.
For more information, contact:
Specialized Information Services
National Library of Medicine
Two Democracy Plaza, Suite 510
6707 Democracy Boulevard, MSC 5467
Bethesda, MD 20892-5467
Telephone: (301) 496-1131
FAX: (301) 480-3537
E-mail: tehip@teh.nlm.nih.gov
URL: http://sis.nlm.nih.gov
For information on NLM services, contact:
National Library of Medicine
Customer Service
8600 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, MD 20894
Telephone: 1-888-FINDNLM (1-888-346-3656) or (301) 594-5983
e-mail: custserv@nlm.nih.gov
(alphabetical list) http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/factsheets.html
(subject list): http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/factsubj.html
