Public Health

Larry Lewis rarely appears in the limelight. Sometimes he gets written up in a local Michigan newspaper, but he certainly doesn’t seek it out. Ask him about his work, and he’ll tell you that the truly inspiring work is being done by his wife, who has been a clinician for as long as he’s been a community organizer. Try to steer him back to his work, and he names everyone on his team and describes them all as indispensable.

EDC’s Adult Literacy Media Alliance (ALMA) has developed “Health Smarts While You Wait,” a volunteer-based health literacy program implemented in clinic and hospital waiting rooms to help patients improve their health literacy and manage their healthcare more effectively.

Underage drinking affects not only teens, but their families and the community-at-large. An ongoing project in EDC’s Health and Human Development Programs (HHD)is working to change the social norms that contribute to dangerous teen drinking in Revere, Massachusetts, an urban community of 47,000 just north of Boston.

Hunger and undernutrition, as well as obesity, plague schoolchildren around the world. Along with vitamin and mineral deficiencies, nutritional problems can obstruct a child’s ability to enroll, attend, and thrive in school. While the inextricable link between health and learning has long been recognized, the most effective way to improve health for students has been less apparent.

Written for public health practitioners and students, Injury Prevention and Public Health: Practical Knowledge, Skills, and Strategies works from the premise that in most cases “injury is not an accident”—not the result of unpredictable or unavoidable occurrences. Instead, most injuries are foreseeable events with known causes and risk factors—and are therefore preventable.