Family History Public Awareness Campaigns

CDC is working with its public health partners, including states and professional organizations, to promote the use of family health history for disease prevention. Collaborative campaigns to increase public awareness about the importance of family health history and to improve and facilitate the use of family history information by health professionals. These campaigns have included both public awareness and provider education programs.

U.S. Surgeon General’s Family History Initiative

CDC collaborated with the U.S. Surgeon General and other HHS agencies on the Surgeon General’s Family History Initiative, which is a national campaign that marked Thanksgiving as National Family History Day. This initiative also included the development of a free, publicly-available Web-based tool called “My Family Health Portrait” — a simplified version of . The tool is available free to the public.

States and U.S. Territories Distribution

CDC delivered packets of family history resource materials to chronic disease and genetics experts in health departments of every U.S. state and territory. These materials were designed to assist local health departments in their efforts to educate people about the importance of collecting their family health history.

AAFP Continuing Medical Education

In 2005, CDC collaborated with the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) to develop Web-based modules on family history for the Annual Clinical Focus (ACF) on Genomics. These modules, for which physicians received Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits, are no longer available online, but a resulting set of genomics guidelines for physicians were developed.