Rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are epidemic in Niagara County, the county health department’s latest Community Health Assessment shows.

The department is organizing a coalition of human service agencies and groups to take aim at these hefty public health problems.

The difficult task ahead, according to deputy director Victoria Pearson: Getting people to help themselves.

Lifestyle changes — eating a better diet, exercising more, dropping bad habits like smoking and binge drinking — are the best means of preventing many chronic illnesses, public health experts know.

How to get people turned on to prevention, instead of pills once health problems emerge, is the question posed to the newly formed Healthy Communities Capacity Building coalition.

“Health care is very expensive and ... people are too dependent on a health system that’s focused on acute care (medication, surgery, responding to problems),” Pearson said. “What about prevention? Diet? Exercise? Behavior is 30 to 40 percent” of a person’s health status.

The county’s 2010-13 Community Health Assessment, compiled by Public Health Educator Claudia Kurtzworth from state and federal data, shows the Niagara County population isn’t among the healthiest in New York state, despite the fact residents have higher-than-state-average rates of health insurance coverage and visits to doctors.

Of Niagara County residents, it says:

• 62 percent of adults are overweight or obese. About 27 percent are obese, compared with 23 percent statewide.

• 12 percent of adults have diabetes, compared with 10 percent statewide.

• 27 percent are smokers, compared with 17 percent statewide.

• Rates of heart disease and lung cancer are among the highest in the state.

“We have so many epidemics going here ... and they’re all equal opportunity diseases; they’re not limited to low-income (populations),” Kurtzworth said.

With encouragement from the state, the health department is reaching out to local human service agencies to get them jointly addressing Niagara’s “areas of high concern,” according to Wanda Smiley, director of patient services.

The Healthy Communities Capacity Building coalition is an attempt to put myriad organizations — YMCAs, food pantries, Head Start, hospitals, schools, Cornell Cooperative Extension, Catholic Charities, etc. — together to advance discussion of, and strategies for, teaching nutrition, fitness and healthy lifestyles to segments of the population.

Ideally, Smiley said, agencies will share information and work together on common goals, including winning grants for outreach projects. “Core” members of the coalition are receiving training in interagency cooperation.

“I think a lot of agencies realize some things need changing, but no one can do it alone,” she said.

The core group is meeting at 9 a.m. March 31 at the Cooperative Extension, Lake Avenue, Lockport. Service organization representatives who want more information about the coalition may call Smiley at 439-7480.

Separately, Pearson said she’s looking into the way school breakfast/lunch menus are set and why. Her curiosity is piqued after a series of flu shot clinics at local school; while staffing them, she ate the same lunches that school children get and was dismayed to learn one school offers French fries every day.

“Schools should be an example to children,” she said. “If it were up to me, (students) would have only healthy choices.”

Contact reporter Joyce Miles at 439-9222, ext. 6245.