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Design Healthy Home Living

Housing conditions can significantly affect public health. Childhood lead poisoning, injuries, respiratory diseases such as asthma, and quality of life issues have been linked to the more than 6 million substandard housing units nationwide. Residents of these units are also at increased risk for fire, electrical injuries, falls, rodent bites, and other illnesses and injuries. Other issues of concern include exposure to pesticide residues, indoor toxicants, tobacco smoke, and combustion gases. The burning of oil, gas, and kerosene can release a variety of combustion products, including carbon monoxide, a known cause of illness and death. In its Healthy People 2010 goals, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services calls for a 52% reduction in the number of substandard occupied housing units throughout the United States.

Most public health efforts take a categoric approach to health and safety hazards in the home, focusing narrowly on one issue, even in the presence of multiple issues. A Healthy Homes approach is holistic and comprehensive and provides public health professionals, including environmental public health practitioners, public health nurses, and housing specialists, the requisite training and tools necessary to address the broad range of housing deficiencies and hazards associated with unhealthy and unsafe homes.

What Is CDC’s Healthy Homes Initiative?

CDC’s Healthy Homes Initiative is a coordinated, comprehensive, and holistic approach to preventing diseases and injuries that result from housing-related hazards and deficiencies. The focus of the initiative is to identify health, safety, and quality-of-life issues in the home environment and to act systematically to eliminate or mitigate problems.

The Healthy Homes Initiative seeks to:

• Broaden the scope of single-issue public health programs, such as childhood lead poisoning prevention and asthma programs, to address multiple housing deficiencies that affect health and safety.
• Build capacity and competency among environmental public health practitioners, public health nurses, housing specialists, managers, and others who work in the community, to develop and manage comprehensive and effective healthy homes programs.
• Promote, develop, and implement cross-disciplinary activities at the federal, state, tribal, and community levels to address the problem of unhealthy and unsafe housing through surveillance, research, and comprehensive prevention programs.
• Facilitate the collection of local data and monitor progress toward reducing or eliminating housing deficiencies and hazards.
• Expand collaborations with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, national associations and organizations, academia, community-based organizations, and others, including the American Public Health Association, National Environmental Health Association, and the World Health Organization.
• Promote research to determine causal relations between substandard housing and adverse health effects.
• Develop guidelines to assess, reduce, and eliminate health and safety risks.
• Identify and implement low-cost, reliable, and practical methods to reduce health and safety risks in substandard housing.

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