State Occupational Health and Safety Surveillance Program

Details

• Personal Author:
  Elderbrook M ; Grajewski, Barbara A. ; Meiman J
• Description:
  Wisconsin maintains a fundamental occupational disease and injury surveillance program within the Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Health (BEOH) in the Division of Public Health, Department of Health Services (DHS). These cooperative agreement funds have enabled the Wisconsin Occupational Health (OH) Program to dedicate 1.2 full-time equivalent professional staff to maintain core occupational disease and injury surveillance. The program manager serves as the strategic focal point to promote integration of occupational health into all of Wisconsin's public health programs leveraging state and local public health capabilities, partnerships, and capacity to reduce occupationally-related injuries and death. The Wisconsin OH Program annually contributes all 25 Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE)/NIOSH occupational health indicators (OHI) to the NIOSH national surveillance system and actively collaborates with NIOSH and the other states' occupational health programs. The OHI showed that some specific Wisconsin industry sectors and occupation groups (manufacturing, agriculture, health care) have rates of injury that are higher than the national average and therefore deserved priority programmatic attention while other indicator data showed stable or decreasing rates for many occupational health injuries and illnesses. The OH Program developed innovative approaches to augment and enhance available surveillance data. We established a data use agreement in 2017 that allowed access to Unemployment Insurance (UI) denominator data for Workers Compensation (WC) analyses. We developed methods to stand up a validated, semi-automated surveillance system for households at risk for take-home lead (THL) exposure among Wisconsin adults and children with records in two separate databases. Wisconsin joined the national initiative of states who have implemented death certificate industry and occupation (I/O) autocoding. Within the COVID-19 effort, we began the process to add NIOCCS autocoded I/O to the Wisconsin Electronic Disease Surveillance System (WEDSS). Five new occupational illnesses were added to Wisconsin's Administrative Code for reportable conditions in 2018: carbon monoxide poisoning, silicosis, asbestosis, chemical pneumonitis, and lung diseases from exposures to biodusts and bioaerosols. Webpages, investigation protocols, and questionnaires were developed for reporting and case follow-back (WI DHS, 2019). In year five of the cooperative agreement, we piloted a Wisconsin silicosis surveillance process to address underreporting of cases and obtain case interview data. The NIOSH cooperative agreement has allowed Wisconsin to build a more robust and diverse surveillance data system to support occupational disease and injury prevention. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Asbestos Dust Health Promotion Inorganic Chemicals Lung Diseases Morbidity Occupational Health Public Health Respiratory Tract Diseases Safety
• Keywords:
  Asbestosis Bioaerosols Chemicals Dusts Health Programs Lung Disease Morbidity Rates Pneumonitis Public Health Surveillance Workers Compensation

  More +
• Series:
  Grant Final Reports
• Publisher:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Cooperative Agreement
• Genre:
  Final Cooperative Agreement Report
• Place as Subject:
  OSHA Region 5 ; Wisconsin
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Division:
  OEP - Office of Extramural Programs
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  1-23
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20066520
• Citation:
  Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, U60-OH-010898, 2021 Sep; :1-23
• Contact Point Address:
  Jonathan Meiman, MD, Chief Medical Officer and State Occ. & Environmental Disease Epidemiologist Wisconsin Division of Public Health 1 West Wilson St, Room 150, Madison, WI 53703
• Email:
  Jonathan.Meiman@WI.gov
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2021
• Performing Organization:
  Wisconsin Department of Health Services, Madison
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20150701
• Source Full Name:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• End Date:
  20260630
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:7cf2006b3285abb8eabf040b4157f362b8b6a70b709dabd9a20bbb5c8fb6ecb40ffce97bb741f913795580727ce5790e85d80467b887ab8926f011881c8f6752
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/219162/cdc_219162_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 288.21 KB ]