Top 5 Health Trends

Amy Lagarda

Public Health Project for San Diego County

The Chronic Health and Disparities office included data about how cardiovascular disease, cancer, lung disease, and diabetes are the top five chronic diseases in San Diego County .

Cardiovascular disease has been a growing problem. Heart attack, strokes, and coronary heart disease are the number one disease in San Diego County. Coronary diseases claim about three thousand lives per year just in the county of San Diego even though the numbers have been decreasing throughout the years.  San Diego County has then tried to create some preventative programs to help with these issues that deal with obesity and tobacco using that is the main cause for heart diseases. Programs like the Childhood Obesity Initiative are preventative programs to try and stop this chronic disease before they occur.

Lung diseases are the second of the top five chronic diseases in San Diego County. Things such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary chronic disease are one of the top rated lung diseases.   Tobacco and obesity are main contributors to this disease.  Twenty two people have died in because of asthma attacks. Fourteen thousand people were treated by EMT’s in 2009 alone. Pollution isn’t necessarily a problem in the coastal city of San Diego since its right next to the ocean but smoking and second hand smoke are bigger contributors than pollution.

Diabetes is another chronic disease that affects many residents in San Diego County. In the past year diabetes has killed five hundred people in San Diego County. Five thousand people have hospitalized in the past year because of diabetes. Diabetes can be caused because of genetics but it is usually correlated with obesity. The resulting obesity is an increasing problem not just in San Diego County but also in the United States.

Obesity As mentioned in previous sections obesity is a growing problem in San Diego County. It is estimated that obesity kills three hundred people in the United States in one year alone. Statistics also prove that children that are obese have a seventy percent chance of being obese when they are an adult. That is why working with chronic diseases mainly work in the art of prevention rather than containment. The San Diego County pays close attention to children and obesity problems even set up programs to battle this country wide problem.

HIV        The public health office is also in charge to collect data about the communicable diseases that affect the San Diego county. Deadly diseases like HIV and are kept track of. The amount of people with HIV has stayed below the fifteen percent mark since 2003. The rate of all reported sexually transmitted disease has increasing over the years. Again as mentioned before it is important to gather important information like this so that there can be programs set up to help stop the spread of disease, and other problems that impede the possibility of a healthy life. For this project I tried to get a hold of the public health offices in the county of San Diego.  I mostly got a lot of recordings and no one wanted to return my calls, but all this information was gathered from the San Diego Public Health website.