For Immediate Release: Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Councilmember Leventhal Lauds Report
Declaring Montgomery is Maryland’s ‘Healthiest County’
‘This Validates Our Efforts to Ensure We Are
Creating the Nation’s Healthiest, Safest and Cleanest County’
ROCKVILLE, Md., April 10, 2018—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 fifth 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, Carroll, Calvert, and Frederick counties.
“As chair of the Council’s Health and Human Services Committee for fifteen years, I’m proud that the County’s ongoing efforts to improve the health and welfare of our residents continue to produce results,” said Councilmember George Leventhal. “Montgomery County is one of the best places to live in America and we continue our efforts to promote good health for all.”
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 trans fats from restaurant food; and banning traditional smoking and the smoking of electronic cigarettes in restaurants and in many public places.
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/app/maryland/2018/overview .
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Release ID: 18-105