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Article: WHAT IS PUBLIC HEALTH AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?
- Article from:
- Rachel's Democracy & Health News
- Article date:
- April 13, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Environmental Research Foundation Apr 13, 2006. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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I'll define public health in a minute. But first, "Why does public health matter?"
Public health matters because
** Many of us are spending our lives working on public health problems without necessarily recognizing that that's what we're doing.
When we worry about mercury in fish, the effects of diesel exhaust on asthma, lead paint in housing, schools built on toxic waste dumps, or workers getting leukemia from benzene - we are worrying about the same kinds of problems that public health workers have been tackling since about 1850. Long before there was an Environmental Protection Agency (created in 1970), public health workers have been trying to make the environment (broadly defined) ...