Edward Sondik, PhD, CDC, National Center for Health Statistics
Edward Sondik's work provides the foundation that helps Americans lead healthy lives. "The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics is the nation's principal government agency collecting statistics on Americans' health; we provide the picture of the landscape. This data, precise and detailed, is crucial to all health and medical research. It is fundamental to understanding our health and how to improve, protect and take charge of our own well being."
Directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's efforts in gathering, analyzing and disseminating the nation's statistics on health is no small task. "We provide the basic numbers needed by anyone and everyone conducting every type of health research," shares Edward Sondik, PhD. "For example, you need to know the number of people who have the problem you want to study, who they are, and then begin to narrow down how to help those people -- this fundamental research, data gathering and analysis forms the basis for studying our lives, our health, and putting together clinical trials."
Today, many of us don't give a second thought to the "un-leaded" gasoline option at the pump. This is a public health success story. Twenty five years ago, as a result of this data gathering effort by NCHS, high levels of lead were detected in children. "Our research helped get the lead out of gasoline - a change that happened rapidly because of this research and the evidence that revealed that lead from a number of sources including gasoline and paint were harming our children's health. With the data and research we have been gathering and putting to work over the last decades, we have had great success in saving our children from certain and irreversible brain damage."
Research, and the funding for it, is crucial to helping us evaluate the tools we're using to improve health - it is research that enables us to compare one section of the country to another, or one country to another, as we've recently heard in the debate over how to make our own health system better by looking at health systems around the world. Today, one of the most crucial questions facing our country is how to use our resources more effectively to improve our health status here in the U.S.
Sondik takes pride in one of his Center's major achievements -- coordinating, analyzing and publishing the data that is at the core of informing and managing the Department of Health and Human Services' Healthy People program. Healthy People helps to set the Nation's public health and prevention agenda and is one of the reasons for the huge gains in tobacco use cessation. Bolstered by this success, we can look to research to help us identify the why's and how's when it comes to improving our health. Looking ahead, Sondik would like to see every community with its own data collection system linked to a national system, where we can get an accurate comparison of what's going on, and how we could empower people with easy to understand information to make effective health decisions for themselves and their families.
Lastly, another aspect of this Center is celebrating its 50 year anniversary, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Have you wondered how the FDA decides to fortify foods with certain vitamins and minerals? And those pediatric growth charts so familiar to every parent, where does that information come from? The data can all be traced, in varying degrees to NHANES.
In this case, the numbers do speak for themselves and for us!