achievements
lborkowski | May 24, 2011I've written before about "Ten Great Public Health Achievements of the 20th Century," which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in 1999. Now, CDC has put together a list of ten great public health achievements from 2001 to 2010, based on nominations from the agency's public health scientists. Here are the ten achievements from the first decade of the 21st century:
Vaccine-Preventable Diseases -- Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases have dropped over the past decade, and the impact of the pneumococcal conjugate and rotavirus vaccines has…
lborkowski | September 3, 2010When I first started to get interested in public health several years ago, I thought of it mostly as dealing with things like vaccines and handwashing. From one of my friends who enrolled in a Master of Public Health program, I learned that it actually covers a whole range of issues that affect the population's health and quality of life - things like workplace and highway safety and smoking cessation, in addition to control of infectious diseases.
The word "population" is key to understanding public health. Healthcare providers focus on individual patients; public health workers focus on…