Standards Required for the Development of CDC Evidence-Based Guidelines.

CDC is the nation's premier health promotion, prevention, and preparedness agency. As such, CDC is an important source of public health and clinical guidelines. If CDC guidelines are to be trusted by partners and the public, they must be clear, valid, and reliable.

A cost-benefit analysis of three older adult fall prevention interventions.

Introduction: One out of three persons aged 65 and older falls annually and 20% to 30% of falls result in injury. The purpose of this cost-benefit analysis was to identify community-based fall interventions that were feasible, effective, and provided a positive return on investment (ROI).

Methods: A third-party payer perspective was used to determine the costs and benefits of three effective fall interventions.

Measuring success: the case for calculating the return on investment of environmental public health tracking.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) Program has funded multiple partners to develop a nationwide surveillance system that focuses on the environment and its impact on human health. To show that investing in a nationwide EPHT Network is a sound practice, the program must demonstrate that monetized improvements to the public's health due to tracking outweigh the costs. In the process of developing capacity for the EPHT Network, programs have had a positive impact on the public health.

Public goods and externalities: a research agenda for public health economics.

Among the many roles a government plays in our daily lives, protecting the public's health is one of the most conspicuous. The government provides goods and services such as registration of births and deaths, public health surveillance of disease and injury, outbreak investigations, research and education, health insurance for the poor and elderly, enforcement of laws and regulations, evaluation of health promotion programs, and assurance of a competent healthy workforce. In the past, economics in public health has almost exclusively focused on efficiency of programs through the use of cost-effectiveness or net present value measures clustered under the rubric of "economic evaluation.

Measuring the public's health.

Allocation of public health resources should be based, where feasible, on objective assessments of health status, burden of disease, injury, and disability, their preventability, and related costs. In this article, we first analyze traditional measures of the public's health that address the burden of disease and disability and associated costs. Second, we discuss activities that are essential to protecting the public's health but whose impact is difficult to measure.