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Article: Prevention
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Public Health
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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PREVENTION
The term "prevention" encompasses the philosophy, credo, programs, and practices that aim to defer or eliminate diseases, disability, and other forms of human suffering. Additional discussions of disease prevention, the stages of prevention (primary, secondary, and tertiary) and the issues of clinical prevention in the setting of personal health services can be found elsewhere in this encyclopedia. The notion of prevention in populations has a long history of discovering and eliminating the causes of disease. For example, in the 1840s Hungarian physician Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweis reduced the rates of puerperal sepsis among pregnant women through attendant hand washing. In the ...