The Ten Essential Public Health Services are public health activities that should be taken to overcome a health problem with in a community, for example tobacco prevention. Tobacco use is a major health problem, and we are going to use thees ten essential services to analyze the situations, find risk factors, and use the resources to prevent this public health issue.
We chose tobacco prevention among teens because adolescent period is the time where most smokers start using cigarettes. For example in the US there are about nine of ten cigarette smokers first tried smoking age of 18, and up to 99% tried smoking by age of 26 (CDC, 2015), Besides that tobacco use is the number one cause of preventable deaths, so it is critical to prevent smoking at younger age, and this will have great impact of the burden in terms of morbidity and mortality. In my paper I am going to concentrate on three points of the ten essential services of public health to address this problem:
1- Monitor health status to identify and solve community health problems.
2- Enforce laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety.
3- Assure competent public and personal health care workforce.
First, monitoring health status to identify and solve tobacco use among teens is a crucial step of the tobacco prevention,
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So we should have regulations on TV and radio commercials, posters, and other media messages to counter tobacco advertisements (CDC, 2015). Additionally we should make regulations to prohibit the distribution of free samples of cigarettes. For effective laws and regulations enforcement, we should include community mobilization because engaging community in identifying community priorities, resources, needs and solutions will promote any developmental activities