Institute Profile

For more than 90 years, the National Institute of Public Health and National Institute of Hygiene (NIPH-NIH) have acted to protect and promote public health in Poland. The primary mission lies in surveillance and training in the field of epidemiology of infectious diseases and selected non-communicable diseases. The institute also monitors the country’s vaccines, sera, and pharmaceutical products.

With a staff of 330, the institute is broken into three divisions:

• Epidemiology and Microbiology, which focuses on Epidemiology, Bacteriology, Virology, Parasitology, Sera and Vaccine Evaluation, and Biological Contaminants
• Public Heallh, which focuses on national disease surveillance and health policy
•  Environmental Health, which focuses on radiation protection and radiobiology, environmental toxicology, food research and consumer health, communal hygiene, health resorts materials, and medical entomology

In 2008, the institute published a comparative health survey on the entire Polish population relative to other European populations.  In the future, the institute hopes to extend research on health inequalities throughout Poland and further develop activities in public health genomics.