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.
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Famous quotes containing the word health:
“As they move into sharing parenting, men often are apprentices to women because they are not yet as skilled in child care. Mothers have to be willing to teach fathers—both by stepping in and showing and by stepping back and letting them learn.”
—Nancy Press Hawley. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 6 (1978)
“Of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one.... Vitality never “takes.” You have it or you haven’t it, like health or brown eyes or a baritone voice.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“In health of mind and body, men should see with their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and war with their arms, not with engine-beams, nor rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before you can see them.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)