New Public Health Measures
THE NEW PUBLIC HEALTH
Stephen R Leeder
7 March 2005
James Cook University, Townsville
Introduction
All of us here today are public health enthusiasts. If we weren’t we would be somehwere else, maybe helping sick people to get better. That is a worthy calling and thank goodness for all the people who do it. But so too is prevention, so too is keeping society healthy, so too is protecting the environment, so too is keeping food and water safe, so too is attending to immunization and child health.
When we talk about public health these latter things, that focus on the whole community, or groups within society and the things that determine their health, are what we are talking about. This is big picture stuff. This is about asking why some communities are healthy and some are ill. Why do some communities have such high rates of diabetes, like the Pacific Islands, while other countries have no diabetes but lots of HIV and TB?
These are the kind of interests and enthusiasms that have led people into public health as a career for as long as it has been around. These are the kind of questions that were asked ages ago and which are still appropriate to be asked now. So what is this thing called the ‘new’ public health? How has it come about and does it have added value?
In brief, the new public health has come about because of growing interest in the subtle interaction of the environment with people living in affluent societies. The old public health remains the public health that most of the world needs, quite frankly, because communicable disease, malnutrition and other scourges are still the major killers worldwide. These are more or less the same as those that led people in the fifteenth century to look at how things such as the plague and cholera could be controlled through sanitation, clean water and quarantine.
The new public health
But the new public health is much more concerned with the interplay between affluence, social well being, education and
Stephen R Leeder
7 March 2005
James Cook University, Townsville
Introduction
All of us here today are public health enthusiasts. If we weren’t we would be somehwere else, maybe helping sick people to get better. That is a worthy calling and thank goodness for all the people who do it. But so too is prevention, so too is keeping society healthy, so too is protecting the environment, so too is keeping food and water safe, so too is attending to immunization and child health.
When we talk about public health these latter things, that focus on the whole community, or groups within society and the things that determine their health, are what we are talking about. This is big picture stuff. This is about asking why some communities are healthy and some are ill. Why do some communities have such high rates of diabetes, like the Pacific Islands, while other countries have no diabetes but lots of HIV and TB?
These are the kind of interests and enthusiasms that have led people into public health as a career for as long as it has been around. These are the kind of questions that were asked ages ago and which are still appropriate to be asked now. So what is this thing called the ‘new’ public health? How has it come about and does it have added value?
In brief, the new public health has come about because of growing interest in the subtle interaction of the environment with people living in affluent societies. The old public health remains the public health that most of the world needs, quite frankly, because communicable disease, malnutrition and other scourges are still the major killers worldwide. These are more or less the same as those that led people in the fifteenth century to look at how things such as the plague and cholera could be controlled through sanitation, clean water and quarantine.
The new public health
But the new public health is much more concerned with the interplay between affluence, social well being, education and
References: 1. Marmot, M ‘Inequalities in Health’, The New England Journal of Medicine 2001;345(2):134-136 2. Lalonde, M (1974) A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians. Ottawa: National Ministry of Health and Welfare 3. Baume, F (1998) The new public health: an Australian perspective Publisher: Oxford University Press 4. Leeder S R (1999) Healthy Medicine, Challenges facing Australia’s health services Publisher: Allen & Unwin 7