• 
• CLASS
• JOBS
• AUTO
• HOMES

UW-Madison health researchers to visit area

JANESVILLE — Health researchers from UW-Madison's School of Medicine and Public Health will be seeking to interview randomly selected households in Rock County next week.

The Survey of the Health of Wisconsin is a statewide research project that meets with residents to measure their health.

Survey teams will visit 28 households in Rock County and Rock Township. Each of the households will represent about 3,000 Rock County residents in the data collection, according to a news release

Janesville and Rock Township study participants will be interviewed in their homes and later have some brief physical measurements taken at SHOW's specially designed Mobile Survey Center, which travels the state to easily reach participants. All the individual information collected by SHOW will be kept confidential.

SHOW surveyors will knock on the doors of randomly selected households to complete a multi-step, in-person health survey. SHOW combines personal interviews, laboratory tests, physical measurements and community environmental measurements to gather health information. The information that SHOW compiles will be made available to researchers who are interested in Wisconsin's public health issues.

Roughly 1,200 households in Wisconsin are invited to participate each year.

"SHOW aims to present a picture of the health of people in Wisconsin," Dr. F. Javier Nieto, director of SHOW, said in a statement. "Our vision is that the information SHOW collects through the years will play an important role in monitoring the health of Wisconsin people, and in guiding community and statewide health services."

With the launch of SHOW, Wisconsin will be the first state to monitor the health of its residents with a survey of this magnitude.