National Public Health Week

Learn how public health keeps your community healthy, protected, and prepared. 

National Public Health Week is April 7-13, and there is no better time to learn how public health is essential to keeping your community healthy. How much do you know about public health? To test your knowledge, keep reading.

What is Public Health? 

Public health helps keep communities healthy, protected, and prepared by focusing on preventing diseases, promoting healthy lifestyles, ensuring access to essential health services, permitting and inspecting establishments according to federal, state, and local public health regulations, and preparing for and responding to emergencies affecting the community’s health.

Keeping you healthy.

Public health uses vaccination, testing and screening, and health education and provides additional essential health services to ensure the health and wellness of your community.

When enough people in a community are vaccinated against vaccine-preventable illnesses like measles, mumps, rubella, or seasonal respiratory viruses like flu and COVID-19, the spread of disease slows, and severe disease risk is reduced, along with complications, hospitalizations, and even death.

Testing and screening help identify infections and diseases, such as HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, breast and cervical cancers, high blood pressure, and diabetes.

Health education helps empower people to improve their lives by giving them tools to assess their risk factors for chronic disease and providing lifestyle recommendations for smoking cessation, nutrition, and exercise that allow individuals to manage existing illnesses while preventing new ones. 

Other essential health services, such as WIC nutrition services for pregnant, breastfeeding, and postpartum women and children aged 1 to 5, family planning, and the administration of programs for children with special needs, also help keep families healthy.

Keeping you protected.

Public health protects our communities from illnesses and diseases through disease monitoring and environmental health services. 

Our public health epidemiologists work closely with healthcare providers, labs, and community partners to detect illness outbreaks and provide infection control recommendations to those affected.

Environmental health services protect you by permitting and conducting health inspections at restaurants, hotels, pools, body art studios, and septic service providers to ensure they follow federal, state, and local safety regulations. 

Keeping you prepared.

Emergencies such as natural disasters, disease epidemics or pandemics, or acts of terrorism involving chemical, biological, or radiological devices have the potential to devastate the health of our communities. 

Public health, along with community partners, assesses community vulnerabilities and plans for, responds to, and helps our communities recover from disasters that can affect people’s health. In an emergency, we inspect and staff shelters, deploy nursing staff to affected areas, and operate Point of Dispensing Sites (PODS) in health-related events to ensure individuals are quickly identified and treated.

Public Health is here for you. 

Whether administering vaccines and screenings your child needs for school, sharing resources to live a healthy life, ensuring food safety at your favorite restaurant, providing guidance to help stop the spread of illnesses or planning for emergencies, public health helps keep your community healthy, protected, and prepared. 

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GNR Public Health proudly serves our community as the local health department for Gwinnett, Newton, and Rockdale counties. We provide essential health services at low or no cost, regardless of insurance. To make a health service appointment at a location near you, call 770.904.3717. For WIC, call 770.513.9738.