🍼 Birth Defects — County Tracker
The entire CDC birth-defects panel — 12 tracked conditions, from limb deficiencies to cleft palate to Down syndrome — pulled live, county by county, and filterable by defect type. This is the county-level birth-outcomes view that state registries guard behind portals, packaged for community action and maternal / women's-health activation.
PHIT Lens: Physical + Environmental · Measure: Birth-Defect Prevalence · Geography: County
Why these 12, and why county-level matters. The CDC Tracking Network monitors these particular defects because each is potentially linked to suspected environmental risk factors — the exact overlap of the Physical and Environmental PHIT Lenses. Seeing them at the county level turns "birth defects are rare" into "here is where the reported rate is highest in your state" — the starting point for prevention outreach, folic-acid campaigns, and exposure follow-up. Because these events are rare, many counties are protected by suppression; the panel shows that honestly rather than hiding it.
Loading live county data from the CDC Tracking Network…
How to read this — and the rules CDC attaches
Each row is one county's 5-year rolling figure for the selected defect: either the prevalence per 10,000 live births or the average annual number of cases, over the chosen period (e.g. 2016–2020). Bars are scaled to the highest reporting county in the selected state.
Reported value
Unstable — small numbers
Suppressed — too few to show
Compare within a state only. CDC is explicit that birth-defect data from different states should not be compared — registries collect differently — so this panel never ranks one state against another. Suppressed protects the privacy of families where cases are few; Unstable flags a rate built on small numbers that can swing year to year. Absence of a county means that state doesn't report it.
Dr. RobMost of these twelve are influenced by things we can act on before conception — folic acid for neural-tube defects like spina bifida and anencephaly, glucose control, avoiding certain exposures. A county that reads high isn't a verdict on families; it's a signal for where preconception and early-prenatal outreach earns the most. And where you see "Unstable," respect it — a rare event in a small county moves the rate a lot with just one or two cases.
Coach LucyThis is where the women's-health work gets local. Pick your state, pick a defect, and you've got a map of where to send a Girl Power® preconception-health activation, a folic-acid drive, or a Foundation-funded outreach cohort. "Suppressed" isn't a dead end — it means the numbers are small enough to protect, and that's its own kind of good news. Use the reported and unstable counties to point the help where it moves the needle.
Source: CDC National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network — Birth Defects content area (12 conditions), pulled live via the EPHT Data API. Data are 5-year rolling prevalence per 10,000 live births (or 5-year average annual case counts). 29 states report to the Network; coverage, counties, and available years vary by state. Compare within a state only — not across states.