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Glossary

Accountability: The willingness to be answerable for consequences of actions and choices.

Chronic diseases: Diseases of long duration, such as heart disease or diabetes.

Cohort: A group of persons sharing a particular sta-tistical or demographic characteristic.

External locus of control: Perception that events in your life occur by chance or because of actions outside your control.

Gender: Roles, behaviors, and characteristics that society associates with males and females.

Gene: The basic physical and functional units of heredity that carry information for developing the proteins that determine the characteristics of specific organisms. When genes are altered so that the proteins cannot carry out their normal functions, genetic disorders can result.

Genome: The complete set of genetic material of an organism.

Health: Soundness of body or mind; freedom from disease or ailment; to have ones health; to lose ones health.

Holistic: Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts.

Homeostasis: Maintaining equilibrium between in-terdependent elements, especially those maintained by physiological processes.

Infectious diseases: Infectious or communicable diseases, caused by a biological agent (e.g. virus, bacterium, or parasite) that can be spread directly or indirectly from one living thing to another.

Infirmity: Physical or mental weakness.

Internal locus of control: Perception that you control and are responsible for events in your life.

Pandemic: An infection that spreads continentally, or even globally.

Reliable data: Data can be considered broadly reli-able if the same results (or ones that are broadly similar) are found by a different researcher asking the same questions to the same (or statistically simi-lar) groups/individuals.

Responsibility: A sense of ownership of actions and choices.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS): A respiratory disease in humans caused by the SARS corona virus (SARS-CoV) and resulting in a death rate of almost 10 percent.

Sex: The biological and physical characteristics that define an individual as either female or male; sexual consumation in loving relationships.

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Sickle cell disease: Disease in which sickle-shaped red blood cells block the flow of oxygen-rich blood.

Tay-Sachs disease: Fatal genetic disorder that de-stroys the nervous system in children. It primarily affects people of Eastern Europe Jewish ancestry.

Valid research: Research that produces results cor-rectly inferred or deduced from a premise. It pres-ents a valid conclusion.

Wellness: An approach to health care that empha-sizes preventing illness and prolonging vital life.

Years of potential life lost: Estimates of the average number of years a person would have lived, had they not died prematurely.