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  Public Health Resource Guide

Librarian
Name: Irene Lubker
Phone: (804) 828-2004
Email: imlubker@vcu.edu

general resourceS

  • Healthy People 2010
    • Healthy People 2010 is a set of health objectives for the Nation to achieve over the first decade of the new century. It can be used by many different people, States, communities, professional organizations, and others to help them develop programs to improve health. 
  • National Health Information Center (NHIC)
    • A health referal center established by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion in 1979. This referal service puts in touch both professionals and consumers with organizations that can best answer their questions.
  • Dictionary of Public Health Promotion and Education
    • This dictionary is available both in electronic form as well as in print in the VCU Libraries. It is useful to both professionals and students of Public Health. It has definitions for terms and concepts frequently used in Public Health.
  • WWW Virtual Library: Epidemiology
    • The WWW Virtual Library is a distributed subject catalog on the web. The Epidemiology page contains links to many useful resources including agencies, organizations, universities, newsgroups, job opportunities, meetings, computing resources and electronic publications. The page is maintained by the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco.
  • Online Dictionary of Epidemiology
    • This electronic dictionary was developed as part of a course on modern quantitative methods in infectious disease at the University of Cambridge.

Public Health

  • Health Web: Public Health
    • This page from the HealthWeb project lists many Internet sites with information on public health, including a separate page of epidemiology resources. HealthWeb is a project of librarians from Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago to provide organized access to evaluated non-commercial, health-related, Internet-accessible resources.
  • Martindale's Virtual Public Health Center
    • Martindale's is described as a "multimedia specialized information resource." Check out this site's listings of statistical databases and simulations, public health textbooks and courses, and many other resources.
  • Public Health Resources on the Internet
    • Another example of a subject page with interesting and useful sites in public health. Special features include lists of sites by health topic and extensive lists of electronic publications. Note: some sources are restricted for use by University of California affiliates since the page is maintained by the Library, University of California, Berkeley.
  • Public Health Law Materials
    • A compilation of materials by CDC that are related to public health law and registration. There is information about Bioterrorism, outbreaks and incidents, natural disasters and other public health topics.
  • The Disparities Solutions Center
    • The Disparities Solutions Center is part of Massachessetts General Hospital. It develops and implements strategies that advance policy and practice to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health care. The goal is to move beyond research and begin to take action—by developing and disseminating models for identifying and addressing racial and ethnic disparities in health care nationally, regionally, and locally.
  • GIS and Public Health
    • National Center for Health Statistics informational web site about GIS and public health geared towards making people understand geographic relationships that affect health outcomes, public health risks, disease transmission, access to health care, and other public health concerns.
    • The VCU Libraries supports GIS by providing GIS resources in both libraries. VCU Libraries own many spatial and numerical data sets. VCU students, faculty and staff can also register for ESRI campus courses and/or VCU GIS list serv by contacting Renée Bosman, the Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs.

epIDEMIOLOGY

  • Public Health Surveillance
  • United States Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics
    • Research to help find the epidemiological causes of cancers. The division uses the fields of Biostatistics, nutritional epidemilogy, genetics, viral epidemiology, occupational and environmental epidemiology, radiation epidemiology and other aspects of epidemiology to find causes of cancer.
  • Supercourse in Epidemiology
    • An on-line peer-reviewed collection of lectures in epidemiology and related topics. Hundreds of lectures covering a broad range of topics in health and epidemiology are available.

BIOSTATISTICS

data sources

  • CDC Wonder
    • From the Centers for Disease Control, CDC WONDER is "a general-purpose public health information and communications system. CDC WONDER provides query access to about 40 text-based and numeric databases. Numeric databases can provide, for example, the numbers and rates of sexually transmitted diseases, cancer cases, or deaths in the United States. Users can request data for any disease and demographic group, by submitting ad hoc queries against available datasets."
  • Epi Info
    • Epi Info, produced by CDC and the World Health Organization provides public-domain software for database and statistics work in public health. Epi Info is a complete system for word processing, data entry, database management, and public health statistics. A companion program for geographic mapping, Epi Map is also available.
  • FedStats
    • A "one-stop shopping center" for statistics from more than 70 U.S. federal agencies. The site includes a search function as well as an alphabetic index and a list of contacts for questions on statistical content.
  • NCHS Data Warehouse
    • The National Center for Health Statistics is the principal health statistics agency in the U.S. and has many files and publications available electronically. This site is only one example of the statistical information available from the federal government - be sure to check out the FedStats site listed above for numerous other sources.
  • StatLib
    • StatLib is "a system for distributing statistical software, datasets, and information by electronic mail, FTP and WWW." It is sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon University Statistics Department. The Datasets Archive is available at http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/
  • Comprehensive Epidemiologic Data Resource
    • CEDR is a project of the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to maintain data on possible exposures and health effects among individual DOE workers.
  • Integrated Public Use Microdata Series
    • The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) is part of the Minnesota Historical Census Projects and is "the largest publicly accessible computerized database on a human population. The IPUMS includes 23 high-precision individual-level samples of the United States population censuses from 1850 to 1990."
  • WHOSIS: World Health Organization Statistical Information System
    • The purpose of the WHOSIS website is to "describe - and to the extent possible provide access to - statistical and epidemiological data and information presently available from the World Health Organization." A keyword search feature allows for searching through the entire WHO website.
  • Virginia Center for Health Statistics
    • Includes vital records data and research reports that help guide health policy for the Commonwealth of Virginia. There are also detailed reports on population, teenage pregnancies, births, deaths, induced terminations and fetal deaths in Virginia.

associations and organizations

journals and newsletters

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Last Updated: April 10, 2008