What Are the Biggest Health Problems In the US Today?

What Are the Biggest Health Problems In the US Today? (1:06)

Some of the most pressing health concerns in the U.S. are actually global health concerns, says Dr. Judy Salerno, executive officer of the Institute of Medicine. To find out what she means, watch this video.

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We certainly don't take population health as seriously as we could or should, and where a lot these interventions can come from. We have a lot of issues around environmental health around health policies like, what do we invest in with NIH dollars? How do we get the most return on our investment? Peggy Amber discussed all the issues related about food safety and drug safety, enormous problems and the context of many of these problems are that they are global health problems.

We don't have borders. Disease doesn't have borders now. Remember SARS, a few years back, was people getting off planes was spreading it. And so we have to start thinking about and training people to care for patients in a different way with more global, broader perspective. So social determinants of health, it's for global aspects and we just do a very poor job of that right now.