Health
The people of Minnesota have a high rate of participation in outdoor activities; the state is ranked first in the percentage of residents who engage in regular exercise.
Minnesotans have low rates of premature death, infant mortality, cardiovascular disease, and occupational fatalities, long life expectancies, and a high rate of health insurance. These and other measures have led two groups to rank Minnesota as the healthiest state in the nation, but in one of these rankings Minnesota descended from first to sixth in the nation between 2005 and 2009, due to low levels of public health funding and prevalence of binge drinking.
On October 1, 2007 Minnesota became the seventeenth state to enact a statewide smoking ban in restaurants and bars with the enactment of Freedom to Breathe Act.
Medical care is provided by a comprehensive network of hospitals and clinics, headed by two institutions with international reputations. The University of Minnesota Medical School is a highly rated teaching institution that has made a number of breakthroughs in treatment, and its research activities contribute significantly to the state's growing biotechnology industry. The Mayo Clinic, a world-renowned medical practice, is based in Rochester. Mayo and the University are partners in the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics, a state-funded program that conducts research into cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart health, obesity, and other areas.
Read more about this topic: Education In Minnesota
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“It is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense in very old books, as the Heetopades of Veeshnoo Sarma; a playful wisdom which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself. It asserts their health and independence of the experience of later times. This pledge of sanity cannot be spared in a book, that it sometimes pleasantly reflect upon itself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“However strongly they resist it, our kids have to learn that as adults we need the companionship and love of other adults. The more direct we are about our needs, the easier it may be for our children to accept those needs. Their jealousy may come from a fear that if we adults love each other we might not have any left for them. We have to let them know that it’s a different kind of love.”
—Ruth Davidson Bell. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 3 (1978)
“In our great concern about the mental health of children, however, we have overlooked the mental health of mothers. They have been led to believe that their children’s needs must not be frustrated, and therefore all of their own normal angers, the normal ambivalences of living, are not permissible. The mother who has “bad” feelings toward her child is a bad mother.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)