For Immediate Release: Thursday, March 26, 2015
The most recent study of county-by-county health status in Maryland has concluded that Montgomery County is “the healthiest county in the state” for the second consecutive year. The report released this week is a collaboration of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The County Health Rankings and Roadmaps program is designed to help communities identify and implement solutions that make it easier for people to be healthy in their schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Ranking the health of nearly every county in the nation, the researchers of the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps program state that it is their mission to “illustrate what we know when it comes to what is making people sick or healthy and the Roadmap shows what we can do to create healthier places to live, learn, work and play.
Following Montgomery in the ranking of Maryland’s 23 counties and the City of Baltimore were, respectively, Howard, Frederick, Queen Anne’s and Carroll counties.
“We have carefully taken several significant steps over the years to improve population health and protect the environment,” said Council President George Leventhal, who chairs the Council’s Health and Human Services Committee. “We also are well aware that not all of these measures were popular when we first presented them. However, over time, residents have learned the benefits of each of these and have come to appreciate them and why they help make Montgomery a great place to live. A distinction such as the ranking given to our County by this study validates the efforts we have made to create the healthiest, safest and cleanest county in the nation have us on the right track.”
Initiatives over recent years that Montgomery County has been at the forefront in implementing to protect the health of its residents include requiring chain restaurants to publish calories and nutrition information on its menus; banning transfats from restaurant food; and banning traditional smoking and the smoking of electronic cigarettes in restaurants and in many public places. The Council is now considering Council President Leventhal’s bill that would ban certain pesticides from being applied to lawns and certain public grass areas.
The rankings look at a variety of measures that affect health, such as high school graduation rates, access to healthy foods, rates of smoking, obesity and teen births. Based on data available for each county, the researchers claim their rankings “are unique in their ability to measure the overall health of each county in all 50 states.”
More information on the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps program is available at its web site at:
http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/sites/default/files/state/downloads/CHR2014_MD_v2.pdf
# # # #