Office of Environmental Health Under Cooperative Agreement with the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry

known as the Superfund law [EPA, 1980]. This law set up a fund to identify and clean up our country’s hazardous waste sites. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the individual states regulate the investigation and clean up of the sites. Since 1986, ATSDR has been required by law to conduct a public health assessment at each of the sites on the EPA National Priorities List. The aim of these evaluations is to find out if people are being exposed to hazardous substances and, if so, whether that exposure is harmful and should be stopped or reduced. If appropriate, ATSDR also conducts public health assessments when petitioned by concerned individuals. Public health assessments are carried out by environmental and health scientists from ATSDR and by states with which ATSDR has cooperative agreements. Arizona is one of the states in which the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) has a cooperative agreement with ATSDR to conduct public health assessments on their behalf. Exposure: As the first step in an evaluation, scientists from ADHS and ATSDR review environmental data to see how much contamination is at a site, where it is, and how people might come into contact with it. Generally, ATSDR does not collect its own environmental sampling data, but reviews information provided by EPA, other government agencies, businesses, and the public