Assignment #1

 My name is Ekaette Obot and I'm a freshman. This is my blog for the Introduction to Public Health lecture at Johns Hopkins. I am a public health major with a natural sciences concentration. In high school, I was interested in a variety of subjects, which mainly included sciences, language, and English courses. As I tried to figure out what a suitable major would be, public health caught my eye because of its broad encompassment of several different pieces of various academic areas. I am particularly interested in international health, which is a subgroup of public health. From what I have discerned from this past week of classes, as well as my own personal understanding, public health can be defined in two major ways. One part of its definition is the simply the health of the population as opposed to the health of the individual. The other general piece of the definition of public health includes the methods employed in order to maintain social, environmental, and medical conditions that foster the best level of health for the present time and ensure improved circumstances for the future.

Public health does have some overlapping with the medical field, which is another reason why I wanted to explore this area. There are some major differences, however, in the way that the two fields operate. While the medical field concentrates mainly on secondary prevention which essentially includes the detection of diseases, public health focuses a majority of its efforts on primary prevention which is defined as preventing disease. Much of the work done by the public health field is more behind the scenes, though it has a great effect of each human being's daily life. In last week's Wednesday lecture, Dr. Alexander discussed how the activities of the public health field effect each individual, even from the time he or she awakes in the morning. For example, the fact that the sheets we sleep on are flame retardant is the result of a precaution put in place by the public heath domain.

Though I would like to explore all areas of public health in order to determine which area holds the most interest for me, I am already especially interested in studying epidemiology. It would be fascinating to study and figure out how certain diseases spread throughout different areas and then determine the best ways to prevent the said diseases from dispersing. Overall, in public health I am looking to examine the overlap between the roles of medicine and public health and the most efficient ways to use their combined influence.

The first two classes gave a broad insight into the exact role that public health plays in our society and daily lives. This was beneficial because for me personally, because I had never truly thought about how involved public heath is with essentially every detail of human lives in order to provide us with safety and better health. Though public health's main focus is the health of the general population, with its works it has a great effect on individuals as well. Also the first two lectures demonstrated how many different sub-areas public health has, showing that no matter what a person's interests are, he or she would most likely be able to find something to be passionate about under the umbrella of public health.