Prevention Efforts in Tuolumne County, part of PHI’s CA4Health program, Featured in Forbes

Before you can improve the health of a community, you need to understand its problems. So when Tuolumne, a small county in central California that includes parts of Yosemite National Park, was awarded a $237,000-a-year federal grant last year from the Prevention and Public Health Fund (part of a $5.9 million grant for small and rural counties in California administered by the nonprofit Public Health Institute), the first step Health Officer Todd Stolp took was to dive into existing data. The second was to gather his own.

Stolp knew there was a high incidence of cancer so he pored over numbers collected by the California Health Department. They showed that Tuolumne had the state’s highest rate of breast cancer, was near the top of the list in lung and bronchus cancers and had higher than average rates of melanoma, bladder and prostate cancer.

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Originally published by Forbes