Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions

Promoting Public Health

  Did You Know?

  • Public health deals with the health of whole populations, rather than the health of individual people.
  • Advances in public health are mainly responsible for the increased life expectancy at birth, which averages 75 years for men and 81 for women.
  • The United States Public Health Service, the main health agency of the federal government, dates to a 1798 law establishing hospitals for seamen in the merchant marine.
  • Experts regard vaccines as the most cost-effective way of preventing infectious diseases.
  • A vaccine for HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, could have major impact on public health, especially in sub-Sahara Africa, where more than 2 million new HIV infections occur annually.
  • More than 60,000 people in the United States die annually from bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotics.
Life expectancy in the 20th Century rose by about 30 years. Advances in protecting the public health were responsible for about 25 of those precious years. Vaccination programs. Improved sanitation to better control infectious diseases. The development of antibiotics. Better prenatal care. And much more. Scientists are making strides toward sustaining that progress by fostering continued improvements in the health of the population as a whole.
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SciFinder®, a research tool produced by CAS (a division of the American Chemical Society), found 4678 references published this year on the broad topic of antibiotic resistance. Analysis of the answer set shows current research related to better understanding the primary mechanisms by which microorganisms develop or exhibit resistance to antimicrobial drugs, how medicinal chemists are using those insights in developing ways to attack these microbes, and studies on individual organisms such as Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium difficile.

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  • Many books have been written in the past few years about promoting public health. These books offer an amazing variety of opinions and viewpoints. Information on many of these books is available from the Library of Congress, http://catalog.loc.gov/

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