By Sam Eldridge
Staff Writer

The Athens campus recently held its second annual Health Fair in the gym.
The group responsible for providing this expo is the Future Health Care Professionals, a club on the Athens campus that regularly participates in anything health science related.
The club’s president, Amanda Ford, spearheaded the event. She said the purpose of the event is to “help educate the community about different health care providers and the importance of eating and living healthily.”
The health fair showcased more than twenty displays of community health programs.
The displays ranged anywhere from local, all-natural grocery stores to the nearby hospitals.
The fair included, Workout Warriors, an organization that provides healthy eating and exercising practices with all proceeds are donated to homebound seniors and people with critical illnesses; Reddy Urgent Care, a provider of medical attention when regular physicians are not available that provided free blood pressure and body fat percentage measurements at the event; Thomas Eye Center, a group of eye care professionals that offered many gifts and urges anyone to check them out on Facebook; and Earth Fare, a healthy supermarket that provides all-natural foods.
Earth Fare offered a big raffle basket full of the store’s healthy goodies.
Other vendors included Learning Ally, an organization that implements reading software technology for students with hearing disabilities; Banyon Tree Center, a counseling center; The Match, a donor and transplant program where anyone can sign up to be a donor of different body fluids to patients with illnesses such as leukemia and sickle cell anemia; and St. Mary’s Health Care System, the local hospital that provided many informational presentations such as breast cancer awareness, the wellness center, and diabetes education.
The National EMS provided a free CPR seminar, and Piedmont had a display to recruit people to join their graduate programs, especially the nursing program.
The fair also included child care, frozen yogurt and other medical services located in the Athens area.
While all the informational sessions were held in the gym, a blood drive led by Julia Schmitz, assistant professor of biology and advisor to the health care club, was going on in the commons building where a total of 13 units was collected and donated.
A Piedmont student even reached a lifetime progress of one gallon of blood donated.