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The Field of Public Health

Public health is concerned with the health of human populations. Theses can be small groups or entire societies. It discovers and promotes the systematic changes that lead to less disease, safer environments, longer lives, and fewer disparities between people around the world.

Public health focuses on prevention. It strives to promote health and prolong life through informing the choices of governments, organizations, communities and individuals. It develops and implements the policies and programs that provide people access to needed care and opportunities to make their families healthy and happy.

This 1920s photograph, taken in the southern United States, showed workers practicing “vector control” by digging a drainage ditch, in order to help disperse standing water that was acting as a popular breeding ground for a population of Anopheles mosquitoes, a well-known vector for the parasitic disease, malaria. (Source: CDC Public Health Image Library).

Learn More About Public Health

 

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