Towards evidence-based, GIS-driven national spatial health information infrastructure and surveillance services in the United Kingdom.

"Another environmental project, the London Air Quality Network (LAQN), was launched in 1993 to coordinate and improve air pollution monitoring in London. By the end of 1999, twenty-nine London Boroughs were supplying data to the LAQN. Increasingly, these data are being supplemented by measurements from local authorities surrounding London, thereby providing an overall perspective of air pollution in South East England. The data are used to generate the daily updated London urban air pollution maps, which are published on LAQN Web site . The core LAQN activities are funded, operated and managed by the Environmental Research Group (ERG) at King's College London, with support and funds from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) []. For all environmental health projects like those presented above, the importance of data quality, currency, completeness and fitness to the purpose at hand cannot be overemphasised. Accurate and statistically representative locational information along with standardised quality-controlled measurements of environmental exposures, over time, are essential if one is to perform robust spatial statistical analyses of suspected associations between the environment and human diseases []."