Places, never people
Every figure is an area-level rate for a state or county. No individual, family, address, certificate or clinical record is ever shown or reconstructed.
Public data · area level only · all 50 states, DC and 3,200+ counties
Project Theodore
Infant & Environmental Health Atlas
See published health statistics and environmental records on the same map.
Project Theodore helps people explore what verified public data records about environmental conditions, population health, pregnancy, birth, and infant outcomes across place and time. It can reveal questions and geographic patterns worth investigating. It cannot determine individual exposure, identify why a child died, or establish causation.
- 3,200+
- County boundaries
- 56
- States, DC and territories
- 6
- Health outcome measures
- 20+
- Environmental record layers
How the Atlas works
Four steps, from a national view to a single county and the evidence behind it.
- Step 1
Choose an outcome and a period
Pick one health measure — infant mortality, sudden unexpected infant death, congenital malformation mortality, fetal death, low birthweight or preterm birth — and the multi-year period you want to look at.
- Step 2
Read the map at three scales
The nation as states, any state as its full set of counties, and a single county as a detailed readout. County colour comes from one metric only, in one of three modes: published rate, compared with the U.S. reference, or data quality.
- Step 3
Add environmental record layers
Overlay Superfund and NPL sites, industrial and emissions facilities, waste and water records, air monitors, drilling disclosures, refineries, pipelines and mines. Each marker opens its own record card with source, version and release date.
- Step 4
Ask, compare, and take the question further
Compare two areas, ask the assistant in plain language or research detail, reproduce any published view, and follow the library into the documentation and peer-reviewed work behind the question.
Suppression is respected
When a source withholds a small-count value, the Atlas shows it as not published. It is never estimated, filled in, or inferred from other figures.
Every layer is traceable
Each layer carries its source, version, release date and review stage, so you can always tell verified public data from demonstration data.
Why families keep asking these questions
Families who lose a baby, or who watch a child through cancer treatment, a birth defect or a lifelong disability, almost always ask the same question: was there something in this place? It is a fair question, and public agencies take it seriously.
Decades of federal and international review have established that children are not small adults. They breathe more air and drink more water for their body weight, their organs are still developing, and exposures during pregnancy and early childhood can matter more than the same exposure later in life. Public bodies including NIEHS, the EPA, the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics all describe this susceptibility, and international review programmes such as the IARC Monographs and the National Toxicology Program publish what is known about specific substances.
What that evidence does not do is settle any individual case. Establishing that a particular exposure caused a particular illness in a particular child takes measured exposure, medical records and careful study design — none of which exist on a map. Place-level patterns can show researchers where to look. They cannot tell a family why.
That is what this Atlas is for: putting published health statistics and published environmental records side by side, honestly labelled, so that legitimate questions can be raised, checked and taken to people equipped to investigate them.
Read the primary sources
- NIEHS — Children's Environmental Health
Why children are more susceptible to environmental exposures than adults.
- U.S. EPA — America's Children and the Environment
Federal indicators linking environmental contaminants and children's health.
- CDC / NCHS — Infant mortality and natality statistics
The published national and state figures this Atlas compares against.
- IARC Monographs — carcinogen evaluations
Which agents the international review process considers carcinogenic, and on what evidence.
- National Toxicology Program — Report on Carcinogens
The U.S. listing of substances known or reasonably anticipated to cause cancer.
- American Academy of Pediatrics — environmental health policy
Clinical guidance for families and paediatricians.
- WHO — Children's environmental health
Global evidence and the recognised limits of it.
If you are worried about your family
Start with your clinician and your state or local health department — they can act on concerns about drinking water, air quality or a specific site. For a private drinking-water well, your state environmental agency can advise on testing. This Atlas holds no information about you and cannot assess your risk.
What this tool is, and what it is not
It is
- A way to view published rates for an area over time.
- A way to see which environmental records exist in the same area.
- A starting point for questions that trained researchers can investigate properly.
It is not
- A diagnosis, a risk score, or advice about any person or pregnancy.
- Evidence that a facility, site or well caused any health outcome.
- A way to locate, identify or count individual cases.
Health outcomes shown here are aggregated public statistics. Map patterns and statistical associations do not establish that an environmental facility or exposure caused an individual outcome. Rates may be unstable where births or deaths are few; suppressed, restricted, provisional, missing, and incomparable data must not be interpreted as zero. Environmental markers show locations or reports, not measured personal exposure. This tool is for transparent public-data exploration and should not be used for medical, legal, or causal conclusions.
Where the data comes from
- CDC / NCHS — WONDER mortality, linked birth and infant death, natality, fetal death
- U.S. EPA — Superfund and NPL, Facility Registry Service, TRI, RCRA, SDWIS, NPDES, AQS air monitoring
- FracFocus / Ground Water Protection Council — hydraulic fracturing disclosures
- U.S. Energy Information Administration — refinery locations and capacity
- Mine Safety and Health Administration — mine locations, operators and violations
- FracTracker Alliance — oil, gas and petrochemical infrastructure documentation
- U.S. Census Bureau — TIGER/Line boundary geometry for all states and 3,200+ counties
Who it is built for
Researchers and universities
Explicit metric definitions, denominators, suppression rules, final versus provisional labelling, source versions and a reproducibility record for every published view.
Public health and environmental agencies
One place to see which released figures and which regulatory records exist for a county, and exactly how current each of them is.
Journalists and community organisations
Traceable public records with citations, plus state-by-state resource lists — with clear limits on what the data can and cannot support.
Parents and families
A calm way to see what public records say about the place you live, in plain language. Nothing here describes your child, your pregnancy or your home, and nothing here can tell you why something happened to someone you love. If you are worried, the people to talk to are your clinician and your state or local health department.
Curious citizens
Plain-language explanations of what a rate means, why small numbers are unstable, and why a nearby facility is never proof of a cause. A starting point for learning, not a verdict.
A library behind every question
Official data documentation, peer-reviewed studies, university research centres, nonprofit and community resources such as FracTracker Alliance, investigative reporting, books and podcasts — each labelled with the kind of source it is, filterable by topic, state and evidence type. Every entry links out to the publisher: the Atlas stores only titles, dates, links and short original summaries, never copied text or audio. Library material is context and is never used in any calculation on the map.
Open the library