Public health is a modern career that has transformed society. While health is typically considered on a person to person basis, professionals who acknowledge health as a societal issue are integral to the humanity’s long-term survival. Here are just a handful of ways that public health policy and officials have improved living standards for certain groups of people:

• Vaccinations alone have completely wiped out certain diseases which had caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the past.
• Polio is basically gone while diseases like rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, and more have been reduced significantly and more importantly – controlled.
• Infant mortality has dropped 90% and mothers giving birth survive 99% of the time – a considerably improvement from centuries ago.
• And more

There are a wide range of professions under the public health umbrella. The main mission of these professionals is to improve public health through education, policy, and research. Some of the most popular career options are teacher, nurse, social worker, or epidemiologists. The minimum education requirement to break into public health (in the majority of cases) is a bachelor’s degree, however some positions will require a master’s. Salaries range from the low $30,000s to $150,000 per year.

One of the growing fields within public health today is environmental studies. The environment, pollution, and purity of our air are things that affect everyone. In fact, a big new story in the last few months has been the terrible pollution in Beijing, China. Coal mines and factories nearby to the city have filled the air with sulfur dioxide and now the air is polluted four times more than the acceptable amount. This kind of pollution leads to serious respiratory conditions which can affect anyone, but children and the elderly are most at risk. This is an example of a public health issue that a professional with the right education can handle. Different people in public health will have to work with government to pass legislation restricting acceptable pollution released by the private business sector, enforcement agencies to test these levels, educators to teach the public how to keep themselves as safe as possible, and more. As you can see, there are many opportunities for working in public health.

If you’re interested in becoming a public health official, the first thing to do is choose a career track – whether into government, education, or research, and then find an education program that will suit your needs. In no time at all, you’ll be serving the public in a meaningful way while improving your career.

Why Public Health by MastersInPublicHealth.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://mastersinpublichealth.org/resources/why-public-health-ig/ ‎.

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