Assignment

Responses will be graded based on 3 things.

1) How thoroughly and thoughtfully you explained the answer. 2) How feasible and creative your response was in terms of solutions, or options for solving problems. 3) How cleanly written it is. Please no typos and no grammatical mistakes.

You must provide links for all of your sources if you reference anything besides your textbook.

*Hint: Each response should probably be at least ½ a page if you are answering thoroughly.

Question 1

Explain, in your own words, the 4 factors (economic impact, individual liberty, moral and religious views, political involvement) that regularly tend to be raised in debates about public health and add to its controversy. Choose one of these factors and provide a current example of how this is affecting public health. In your opinion what can be done to overcome these objections, or make public health less controversial and more effective?

Question 2

In your own words, explain what epidemiology is. Explain what the difference is between incidence and prevalence. Why is epidemiology important to the field of public health? Give at least one specific examples when explaining its importance. How and why must researchers and epidemiologist consider ethics when designing research projects?

Question 3

What does it mean when people say that a public health project is "evidence-based"? Why is it important to use evidence and data when conducting public health work? How do you know if something is a reliable or credible piece of information? What are some examples of credible sources for health information?

Question 4

What are at least 4 things you can do to prevent transmission of infectious diseases? How and why are these strategies effective? Why do you think public health initiatives to vaccinate for polio were so successful in the 1950s? What, specifically, made them successful? How can we learn from successful campaigns for disease prevention from the past, such as polio, AIDS, and others, to attempt to deal with new infectious disease threats such as Zika, Ebola and those yet known?

Question 5

How would you define environmental health? What is the role of government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in protecting us? How are humans a threat to the planet and what can we do to decrease the harm we are inflicting?

Quistion 6

Explain, in your own words what the socio-ecological model is. How does it apply to public health promotion?