Designing and Implementing Interventions to Promote Health and Prevent Illness

Warnings in the media are plentiful about the dangers of potential threats to our health such as flu pandemics, mad cow disease, and excessive use of pesticides and antibiotics. Although efforts to prevent such scenarios from becoming reality are well placed, many other health conditions in which individuals can play a role in their prevention are already taking the lives of millions of people. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that more than 440,000 smokers in the United States die prematurely every year from smoking-related diseases (CDC, 2002). In addition, although HIV infection has been known for more than a decade to be mostly preventable by behaviors such as using a condom, approximately 40,000 persons become infected with HIV each year (Glynn & Rhodes, 2005), and 4.3 million adults worldwide were newly infected with HIV in 2004 (UNAIDS, 2004). These sobering statistics point out the need to develop, and the challenge of developing, effective interventions to promote health and prevent illness.