You are here
Disease Prevention Toolkit
Taking steps to protect your health is the best way to prevent disease and other conditions. Health screenings, vaccines, and guarding yourself from germs and bugs can help keep you feeling your best. Flip each card below for checklists on how to improve your health in each area. Click on the images to read articles about each topic. You can also print the checklists separately or all together to share with others or as a reminder to yourself.
Printer-friendly version of this page
6 strategies for preventing disease
Get screened for diseases
Some screenings can reduce your risk of dying from a disease. But sometimes, experts say, a test may cause more harm than good. Before you get a test, talk with your doctor about the possible benefits and harms to help you decide what’s best for your health.
To learn about screening tests, ask your doctor:
- What’s my chance of dying of the condition if I do or don’t have the screening?
- What are the harms of the test? How often do they occur?
- How likely are false positive or false negative results?
- What are possible harms of the diagnostic tests if I get a positive screening result?
- What’s the chance of finding a disease that woudn’t have caused a problem?
- How effective are the treatment options?
- Am I healthy enough to take the therapy if you discover a disease?
- What are other ways to decrease my risk of dying of this condition? How effective are they?
Guard against germs
For nearly a century, bacteria-fighting drugs known as antibiotics have helped to control and destroy many of the harmful bacteria that can make us sick. But these drugs don’t work at all against viruses, such as those that cause colds or flu. Learn how to protect yourself against germs in the environment.
To block harmful germs:
- Wash your hands often with soap and water, or use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.
- If you’re sick, make sure your doctor has a clear understanding of your symptoms. Discuss whether an antibiotic or a different type of treatment is appropriate for your illness.
- If antibiotics are needed, take the full course exactly as directed. Don’t save the medicine for a future illness, and don’t share with others.
- Maintain a healthy lifestyle—including proper diet, exercise, and good hygiene—to help prevent illness, thereby helping to prevent the overuse or misuse of medications.
Protect your body’s bacteria
Microscopic creatures—including bacteria, fungi, and viruses—can make you ill. But what you may not realize is that trillions of microbes are living in and on your body right now. Most don’t harm you at all. We tend to focus on destroying bad microbes. But taking care of good ones may be even more important.
To protect good microbes:
-
Eat a diet high in fiber. Fiber is found in plants, including fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
-
Limit foods that can hurt your gut microbes. These include sugar and fatty or highly processed foods.
-
Know when to wash your hands, like when preparing food, before eating, or after handling pets or garbage.
-
Use hand sanitizer when you can’t use soap and water. Be sure it contains at least 60% alcohol.
-
Avoid antibacterial soaps and other products. These can harm the protective microbes on your skin.
-
Be wary of “probiotics.” These products can be food or supplements. They may claim to restore a healthy microbe mix, but many have not been properly studied.
Prevent mosquito-borne illnesses
Most mosquito bites are relatively harmless. The itchy bumps often last for just a day or two after a mosquito has punctured your skin. But if the mosquito is carrying certain germs, like viruses or parasites, these pathogens might enter your blood during the bite and make you sick. But we can all take simple steps to avoid getting bit by those blood-sucking insects.
To avoid mosquito bites:
- Use insect repellents. Products containing DEET, picaridin, lemon eucalyptus, para-menthane-diol, or IR3535 can be applied to skin. Follow label instructions.
- Cover up. When outside, wear long sleeves, pants, and socks. Mosquitoes may bite through thin fabric, so spray thin clothes with an EPA-registered repellent like permethrin. Don’t apply permethrin directly to skin.
- Mosquito-proof your home. Install or repair screens on windows and doors to keep insects out. Use air conditioning if you have it.
- Get rid of mosquito breeding sites. Empty standing water from flowerpots, gutters, buckets, pool covers, pet water dishes, and birdbaths on a regular basis.
Block tick bites and Lyme disease
When warm weather arrives, you might get the urge to walk barefoot through the grass. But before you stroll through your lawn or head out on a hiking trail, you’ll want to protect yourself and your loved ones from ticks that often lurk in tall grass, thick brush, and wooded areas. Many ticks carry disease, so do what you can to keep ticks from taking a bite out of you.
To prevent tick bites and tick-borne diseases:
- Help keep ticks off your skin by wearing long sleeves, long pants, and long socks.
- Ward off ticks by using an insect repellant that contains at least 20% DEET (for the skin) or permethrin (for clothes).
- Avoid ticks by walking in the center of trails and steer clear of tall vegetation.
- If you’ve been in an area where ticks are common, bathe or shower as soon as possible, and wash or tumble your clothes in a dryer on high heat.
- Check your body carefully for ticks. They dig and burrow into the skin before they bite and feed.
- Removing ticks right away can help prevent disease.
- If you develop a rash or fever after removing a tick, see your doctor.
Protect yourself and everyone else from disease
We share more than food and culture within our homes and communities. We can also spread disease. Luckily, we live in a time when vaccines can protect us from many of the most serious illnesses. Staying current on your shots helps you—and your neighbors—avoid getting and spreading disease.
To protect yourself and others from preventable diseases, stay up-to-date on shots for these 16 vaccine-preventable diseases:
- Bacterial meningitis
- Chickenpox
- Diphtheria
- Haemophilus influenzae type b
- Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B
- Cervical & other cancers caused by human papillomavirus (HPV)
- Influenza (flu)
- Measles, Mumps, and Rubella
- Pertussis (whooping cough)
- Pneumococcal pneumonia
- Rotavirus diarrhea
- Shingles
- Tetanus
Want to learn more?
NIH scientists study ways to best protect your health and well-being and guard you against diseases. Read more resources from the NIH institutes advancing research in these areas.
This page last reviewed on August 26, 2021