[Archives of environmental health digital maps and their delivery by the Internet].

Geographic Information System is becoming a very important tool for environmental health research. We have produced various digital maps for different scales for different purposes. The burst of E. Coli O-157, distribution of hazadarous chemicals in East Asia, and coastal resin pellets are some examples. It now becomes a problem how to archive these digital maps and how to retrieve these maps according to user's request. We have developed a computer system that can store various types of digital maps and can retrieve them from WWW client machines. The key concept of this archive system is to classify every digital maps according to their region of interest.

[Distribution and origin of plastic resin pellets as environmental pollutants at the East China Sea area].

Plastic debris are important marine pollutants. Plastic debris consist of resin pellets and waste plastics. We are particularly interested in resin pellets. We made field survey of resin pellets at nearly 400 sites in 200 beaches in Japan and neighboring countries. The pellets were found at all most all Japan coasts we surveyed and at some beaches of Macao, Hong Kong, Xiamen, the north of Taipei, and Cheju Island in Korea. The number of pellets was more than 1000 pieces per m2 on the most abundant beach in Japan. Through further analysis using GC/ECD, endocrine disrupting chemicals, PCBs, DDTs, HCHs and Nonylphenol were detected in selected samples. Biota such as Bryozoa were observed on the surface of pellets washed up on the beaches in subtropical areas. Pellets has been suspected to affect wildlife and human health, but we have no report on affection to human.

[Dissemination of drug information by the Internet].

We reported a system for dissemination of the drug information and its related subjects through the Internet (Drug Info Guide) in Bull. Natl. Inst. Health Sci. 1996. Since then, further information were added in the system. These include the web site for ICH Guideline in Japanese and English, and Australasian Cochrane Centre mirror site. Furthermore, the titles and their abstracts which were reviewed by Cochrane groups in Cochrane Library were translated in Japanese, and these information together with the search guide for useful resource regarding the drug information were also presented on WWW.

[Development of a geographical information system and its application to Escherichia coli O-157 patient distribution].

The so called Geographical Information System (GIS) is one of the basic tools for wide range of public health applications. We had developed a general purpose GIS and applied it to represent geographical distribution of patients of the bacterium E. coli O-157 which bursted out in Japan last early summer particularly at Sakai City in Osaka Prefecture. The patient record have been supplied from the Food Safety Office of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. These records were handled by EXCEL. The basic geographical data was constructed from the map data provided by Japan Geographical Survey Institute, and ArcView 2 was used as the map system. The maps were converted to Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) files and put on our Web server.

[Development of a base system for information dissemination of the Internet].

The development of information and computing infrastructure at NIHS (NICI), enabled us to provide a good environment for storing information that can be accessed by the Internet. Information can be stored either on WWW servers or on databases. All databases were developed on PC using database management systems such as 4th Dimension or Access, and were transferred to a UNIX machine with the database management system Sybase. A tool for accessing databases via the WWW (Web) was developed. This interface program used a freeware called Genera. Tools were also implemented for handling the so called VRML worlds.