Health Rankings Show Our Neck Of The Woods Doing Pretty Well

Coun­ties here in north­west Ohio are doing a lot bet­ter than those in other areas of the state when it comes to health.

Defi­ance County res­i­dents in par­tic­u­lar, show lower rates of pre­ma­ture death and exces­sive drink­ing, and are report­ing fewer sexually-transmitted dis­eases than the statewide aver­age. But the good news comes with the bad… locally, we seem to have inad­e­quate access to exer­cise oppor­tu­ni­ties, and we are more likely to have been exposed to drink­ing water vio­la­tions dur­ing the past year accord­ing to a recent study. Those are the find­ings as pub­lished in the annual County Health Rank­ings which were released last week by the Robert Wood John­son Foun­da­tion and the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin Pop­u­la­tion Health Insti­tute. Defi­ance County ranked 18th of Ohio’s 88 coun­ties for health out­comes. Ful­ton County ranked 21st, Henry County ranked 24th and Williams County came in at 14th, while Pauld­ing County ranked near the mid­dle of the pack at 48th. For the third year in a row, Put­nam County came in near the top of the list at sec­ond. The com­plete results of the report can be found at www.countyhealthrankings.org.