ISSUE
Chronic Disease
Heart disease, stroke, cancer, type 2 diabetes and obesity are common and costly, but they are also preventable. The cause of these chronic conditions, illnesses and early deaths are also directly traceable to behaviors such as lack of physical activity, tobacco and alcohol use, and poor nutrition.
Local health departments are key partners in protecting and improving the health of people living in their community. They implement a host of common sense approaches to lower the burden of chronic disease, including increasing access to healthy foods and sponsoring screenings to help residents identify chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. Then they connect people with services and tools to help them get healthier.
Chronic diseases are responsible for
-
Share of our nation's health care costs
90%
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Percent of our nation's deaths
70%
Policy Brief
Investing in prevention: how city health departments tackle chronic disease
About 129 million (or 40%) of Americans live with at least one chronic disease – such as heart disease and hypertension, cancer, diabetes, or asthma. Local health departments provide important community-level solutions to prevent chronic disease.
Tobacco
Smoking cigarettes is the leading cause of preventable death, disability, and chronic disease in the United States, accounting for one in five fatalities.
In the rapidly evolving tobacco market, e-cigarettes and newer vaping products are being marketed to appeal to new customers, targeting youth in particular. Local health departments are taking innovative approaches to fight tobacco use every day, saving countless lives.
Tobacco policy recommendations
Our policy recommendations to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Congress focus on:
Member spotlight
Tobacco companies have aimed menthol cigarette marketing at Black communities for decades. Researchers estimate that removing menthol cigarettes from the market would prevent up to 654,000 smoking-related deaths over time, including more than 238,000 deaths among Black Americans.
Frontline Blog
