Atlanta is a world-renowned health and medicine hub of educational, governmental and private health organizations serving a global community.

	Related: • List of hospitals • List of referral services • List of child care and senior resources

• The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, established in 1946, is arguably the world's most recognizable health operative. Through a network of partnerships and community health organizations, the CDC has become a global authority on a wide range of health and safety issues with a focus on the prevention and control of disease, injury and disability.

• The American Cancer Society, headquartered in Atlanta, is a nationwide voluntary organization with more than 3,400 offices across the country. For more than 80 years, the ACS has been battling cancer through research programs, patient and education services, advocacy and rehabilitation.

• The Arthritis Foundation, which recognizes and combats more than 100 types of arthritis and related conditions through a system of research, programs and advocacy, is also centered in Atlanta.

Atlanta is also home to some of the nation's most renowned medical care facilities. Among the major players:

• The Shepherd Center of Atlanta is the nation's largest catastrophic care hospital treating patients with spinal cord injury and disease, brain injury, and degenerative, neuromuscular and urological disorders.

• Atlanta's Northside Hospital has been providing a full range of services to north metro Atlanta for more than three decades, specializing in lifetime health care for women. The hospital delivers more babies (16,800 in 2001), diagnoses and treats more cases of breast and gynecological cancer and performs more surgeries than any other community hospital in Georgia.

• Grady Memorial Hospital, in downtown Atlanta, is the primary teaching hospital of the Emory University School of Medicine. The hospital's emergency care center is one of the largest in the Southeast, serving an average of 300 patients each day.

• Atlanta's Emory Healthcare System includes the Emory Clinic, Emory Children's Center, Emory University Hospital, Emory Crawford Long Hospital, Wesley Woods Hospital and Center, the jointly owned Emory-Adventist Hospital and EHCA, LLC, a limited liability company. Emory University Hospital is known for cardiology, cardiac surgery, oncology and neuroscience and has become one of the region's largest multiple organ (heart, kidney, pancreas, liver, lung) and tissue transplant centers.