The state of health
PHOTO PROVIDED
Sally Lutz, Linda Pelletier, Anne Pentecost and Linda Brown recently competed in the Charlotte County Senior Women's Doubles Tennis Tournament held at the Riverwood Tennis Club in Port Charlotte. Pelletier and Lutz took home the gold, and Pentecost and Brown were silver medalists.
The County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program, which measures vital health factors in most U.S. counties, has ranked Sarasota County eighth out of Florida’s 67 counties in its 2014 report.
The program, a collaboration between the nonprofit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, annually surveys such factors as high school graduation rates, obesity, smoking, unemployment, access to healthy foods, the quality of air and water, income and teen births. From that information it determines which counties are the healthiest and therefore the ones in which its residents will enjoy a better health outcome, based on an equal weighting of length and quality of life.