Dear Editor,

The auditor general, Mrs Monroe Ellis, recently conducted an analysis into the operations of the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) and identified a number of weaknesses.

Her key findings were that no evidence could be ascertained of an assessment of the current state of the environment, failure to implement monitoring systems, weaknesses in NEPA’s co-ordination of its monitoring and enforcement activity and that only 28 per cent of serious threats to the Jamaican environment were being monitored. These are outrageous concerns and pose a serious threat to the Jamaican environment.

Mrs Monroe Ellis made recommendations that should be applied to NEPA’s processes through greater monitoring and co-ordination. The recommendations included better protection of the environment and the public by NEPA’s management, the transformation and re-energising of the activities of the Enforcement Branch of NEPA, and the generation of revenue to cover costs.

Though the auditor general’s report was solid and instructive, it unfortunately overlooked one of the most important issues, which is the neglect or the inability of NEPA to link environmental protection and public health, both conceptually and from an organisational standpoint.

Mrs Monroe Ellis’ recommendations do not fully address the issue of the need to track many of the exposures and health effects that are directly and indirectly related to environmental hazards. The success of NEPA will greatly depend on the agency’s ability to link environmental protection to public health. Let us be clear, public health may be defined as what is done as a society collectively to assure conditions in which people can be healthy, including environmental conditions.

The current systems or mechanism used by NEPA have failed to effectively track many of the exposures and health effects. In addition, environmental hazards, exposure and disease tracking systems are not linked together, which has resulted in a system that is difficult to study and monitor the relationship among hazards, exposures and health effects.

The goal of an environmental public health tracking system is to protect communities by providing information to local and international agencies that will in turn use the information to plan, apply and evaluate public health actions to prevent and control environmentally related diseases.

The most tangible solution to addressing the present needs and concerns is for NEPA to develop and implement an environmental public health tracking system. This system will have ongoing collection, integration, analysis and interpretation of data about environmental hazards, exposure to environmental hazards and health effects potentially related to exposure to environmental hazards.

The environmental public health tracking system will allow NEPA to monitor and distribute information about environmental hazards and disease trends, advance research on possible linkages between environmental hazards and diseases, develop, implement and evaluate regulatory public health actions to prevent or control environment-related diseases.

Also identified by Mrs Monroe Ellis was the “severe managerial weaknesses” of NEPA. This should be a red flag alert for the McCalla-led Transformation Unit as it has become very evident that NEPA is failing to demonstrate the technical knowledge or ability to achieve its mandate and this limitation will also thwart the development of any tracking system.

I agree with the auditor general’s assessment of limited growth in NEPA’s operations since its inception in 2001. Decisive action and proactive strategies are therefore needed to immediately rectify the current state of NEPA and the vulnerable position of communities caused by the lackadaisical approach to monitoring the environment.

Dr Patrece Charles-Freeman

Public and environmental health management consultant