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HWN Suggests

Why Is Public Health Controversial?

The broad view of public health’s scope generates considerable controversy in America’s individualistic, market-oriented society. The notion that government has an obligation to provide healthy conditions for citizens who are unwilling or unable to provide such conditions for themselves—and indeed to provide medical care for those who need it, as most other industrialized countries do—has often been attacked as socialist. Conservative politicians have won office by campaigning against taxes, starving governments of funds that could provide health services for all. Many Americans reflexively oppose being told what to do and resist the idea of governmental restrictions on their behavior even when…

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Featured

 It’s time to free public health from health care

It took decades to get the public health system we have today. Because of its failures during COVID, we have an opportunity to reform. We can learn from the past to expand the vision and practice of public health beyond medicine. Health is a team sport, and neither health care nor public health can work without the other.

 The Crisis of Trust in Public Health

Modern medicine produces “miracles” every day, yet at the same time, many people do not trust it. This lack of trust has profound implications for health, and for the institutions and professionals that manage global health. Adequate funding, recruitment and retention of talent, and adherence to best practices in public health all depend on trust.

 The Exodus of Public Health What History Can Tell Us About the Future

Nearly a century ago, public health official Hibbert Hill wrote a provocative book, The New Public Health. In it he sought to capture the fundamental changes that had overtaken the field over the previous fifty years and to present a road map to the future. The “essential change” he characterized succinctly: “The old public health was concerned with the environment; the new is concerned with the individual. The old sought the sources of infectious disease in the surroundings of man; the new finds them in man himself. The old public health … failed because it sought them … in every place and in every thing where they were not.”

Articles of Interest

A Call to Service: Social Justice Is a Public Health Issue

Many common health problems are rooted in public health, environmental, economic, and social policies. These include reactive airway disease (tobacco, ozone, air pollution); obesity (farm policy, school lunch quality, fast food advertising, food labeling); heart disease (pollution, smoking, obesity, unavailability of affordable healthy foods and safe places to exercise); depression (poverty); reproductive issues (abstinence-only sex education and lack of access to contraception and pregnancy termination); and injuries caused by violence (poverty, crime, criminal justice system policies, guns). Lower life expectancy, higher rates of infant and child mortality, poorer self-reported health, higher rates of AIDS, depression, obesity, and crime, and diminished trust in people and institutions are all associated with income inequality.

A History of the Public Health System

During the past 150 years, two factors have shaped the modern public health system: first, the growth of scientific knowledge about sources and means of controlling disease; second, the growth of public acceptance of disease control as both a possibility and a public responsibility. In earlier centuries, when little was known about the causes of disease, society tended to regard illness with a degree of resignation, and few public actions were taken.

Biostatistics vs. Epidemiology: Key Topics in Public Health

In public health, knowledge is power. The work of public health professionals such as biostatisticians and epidemiologists can have a tremendous impact on individuals and communities. When their efforts are successful, they can help improve the quality of life in a community, provide children with better opportunities to thrive, reduce health issues and save community members money. The backbone of effective public health strategy is research and analysis. By gathering, analyzing and monitoring data and information, public health officials can identify health issues and develop solutions that potentially lessen their burden on communities. These efforts can range from tracking diseases to being an advocate for laws that keep people safe.

Ethical Issues in Public Health

The field of public health includes a wide scope of activities and professional disciplines, ranging from sanitation, health protection, epidemiology, environmental health, financing, health promotion, including supervision, or the provision of clinical care. Each of these disciplines works in systems that face ethical dilemmas, making it important that public health workers have motivation to understand and practice within the ethical guidelines of their profession, thus making ethics an important component of training and practice. The dangers of ethical lapses are overwhelmingly apparent in the case of the Eugenics movement of the early 20th century which metamorphosed from forced sterilizations in many liberal democratic countries into mass murder of physically and mentally handicapped children and adults in Nazi Germany.

Public Health Under Threat

You’ve probably heard the buzzwords — "Big Beautiful Bill," "Reconciliation," "FY 2025," "FY 2026," "Rescission Package." What do these terms mean, and how could they impact public health funding in your community?

Reimagining Public Health: Mapping A Path Forward

The COVID-19 pandemic and other ongoing public health challenges have highlighted deficiencies in the US public health system. The United States is in a unique moment that calls for a transformation that builds on Public Health 3.0 and its focus on social determinants of health and partnerships with diverse sectors while also acknowledging how the pandemic altered the landscape for public health.

The History of the Public Charge and Public Health

But what are the origins of the “public charge”—a term that has incited so much debate in our country? How is the concept of the “public charge” fundamentally rooted in our nation’s public health system? This article is the first installation of a two part series that will seek to provide some answers to these questions and more.

The History, Ethics, and Politics of Public Health

Crisis and panic are leitmotifs that run throughout the history of medicine and public health. Remarkably, there has been no sustained attention to the history of panic and crisis, their relationship over time, or their critical role in the politics of public health.

The Importance of Teaching History of Inequities in Public Health Programs

Learning the history of inequities is typically not a major part of public health degree programs but can be fundamental to truly understanding health inequities and identifying potential solutions. A historical perspective on inequities can help understand present-day inequities as constructed over time, provide needed context for community engagement efforts, and help identify the system of advantages and disadvantages based on race, gender, and class

The Public and Public Health

We suggest there are three key ways in which ‘the public’ is seen: as a collection of people; as a space for action; and as a set of values. Likewise, public health can be understood in terms of: the challenges it faced or faces; the systems employed to deal with these; and as a kind of philosophy or outlook.

What is public health?

Public health promotes and protects the health of all people and their communities. This science-based, evidence-backed field strives to give everyone a safe place to live, learn, work and play.

Resources

Harvard Public Health

Exploring what works, what doesn’t, and why.