CDC BRFSS Data: Uncensored Data Now Available on Data Lumos
According to the CDC, “The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) is the nation’s premier system of health-related telephone surveys that collect state data about U.S. residents regarding their health-related risk behaviors, chronic health conditions, and use of preventive services.” The BRFSS collects data about topics like alcohol use, healthy diets, HIV/AIDS, health care access, and e-cigarettes.
Until this year, it also included an optional module that states could include in their BRFSS surveying about sexual and gender minorities, including the trans community. This specific inclusion appears to have made it a target of the administration, along with the Youth Behavior Risk Survey (YRBS), also from the CDC, which also asked about sexual and gender orientation, according to KFF. (YRBS has been previously backed up onto Data Lumos.) On the CDC website, BRFSS data has been censored to remove references to gender minorities from previous surveys.
Fortunately, the CDC website was well backed up on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine before the change of administration, and nearly all of the original data files for BRFSS are preserved in snapshots from early January 2025. DRP has now gone through the snapshots to collate the available data and make them available on Data Lumos, both to provide a second backup and to make them more readily accessible.
Big shout out to Lena Bohman for leading the effort to protect this critical data!
Here are the datasets that are now available:
- CDC BRFSS Annual Survey Data 1989-2023 (2024 data does not appear to exist in an uncensored form, and so was excluded)
- SMART: BRFSS City and County Data and Documentation
- BRFSS Asthma Call-back Survey
- BRFSS GIS Data and Documentation
- BRFSS Statistical Briefs and Questionnaires
