Infant mortality was defined as death before completion of first year of life [1]. We obtained linked birth and infant death data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the years 2000–2005, corresponding to the time frame covered by the EQI.

The EQI was constructed for 2000-2005 for all US counties and is composed of five domains (air, water, built, land, and sociodemographic), each composed of variables to represent the environmental quality of that domain. Domain-specific EQIs were developed using principal components analysis (PCA) to reduce these variables within each domain while the overall EQI was constructed from a second PCA from these individual domains (L. C. Messer et al., 2014). To account for differences in environment across rural and urban counties, the overall and domain-specific EQIs were stratified by rural urban continuum codes (RUCCs) (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2015). This dataset is not publicly accessible because: EPA cannot release personally identifiable information regarding living individuals, according to the Privacy Act and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This dataset contains information about human research subjects. Because there is potential to identify individual participants and disclose personal information, either alone or in combination with other datasets, individual level data are not appropriate to post for public access. Restricted access may be granted to authorized persons by contacting the party listed. It can be accessed through the following means: Human health data are not available publicly. EQI data are available at: https://edg.epa.gov/data/Public/ORD/NHEERL/EQI. Format: Data are stored as csv files.

This dataset is associated with the following publication: Patel, A., J. Jagai, L. Messer, C. Gray, K. Rappazzo, S. DeflorioBarker, and D. Lobdell. Associations between environmental quality and infant mortality in the United States, 2000-2005. Archives of Public Health. BioMed Central Ltd, London, UK, 76(60): 1, (2018).