Who began public health and sanitation systems?
local physicians, the Citizens Association established the Metropolitan Board of Health, in 1866 declaring war on garbage. Dividing neighborhoods into districts, the board appointed physician-investigators to monitor and field thousands of sanitation complaints. Within four years groundbreaking sanitation laws were in place.
What is the historical development of Public Health?
The history of public health is a story of the search for effective means of securing health and preventing disease in the population. Epidemic and endemic infectious disease stimulated thought and innovation in disease prevention on a pragmatic basis, often before the causation was established scientifically.
When was the first Public Health Act?
The first act to come to power was the Public Health Act which came out in 1848. This man called John snow was the first person to make the connection between poor living conditions, such as dirty water, and the rise on disease. After this conclusion vaccinations were first created and used to get rid of smallpox.
What is the history of Public Health Nursing?
The beginning of public health nursing is thought to be in mid-1800s in London, England. William Rathbone (1819 -1902) was a Liverpool England philanthropist whose wife became ill. Rathbone hired a nurse, Mrs. Robinson to care for her at home until her death. Rathbone was grateful for the “comfort which a good nurse had been to my wife.”
Ethics
Priority areas
Current practice
Global perspectives
History
Society and culture
Country examples
When was public health introduced?
The 1848 Public Health Act was the first step on the road to improved public health.
When did public health Begin in the US?
The American Public Health Association was founded in 1872 at a time when scientific advances were helping to reveal the causes of communicable diseases. These discoveries laid the foundation for the public health profession and for the infrastructure to support our work.
How did public health originate?
Public health evolved through trial and error and with expanding scientific medical knowledge, at times controversial, often stimulated by war and natural disasters. The need for organized health protection grew as part of the development of community life, and in particular, urbanization and social reforms.
Who started the public health system?
Similarly, in New York, John Griscom published The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of New York in 1848. This report eventually led to the establishment of the first public agency for health, the New York City Health Department, in 1866.
Who is the father of public health?
Cholera is an infectious disease that became a major threat to health during the 1800s.
Who defined public health?
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “Public health refers to all organized measures (whether public or private) to prevent disease, promote health, and prolong life among the population as a whole.
What are the 4 components of public health?
4 Essential Components of Population Health ManagementStrategic. Communities need to define their priority issues.Structural. An entity such as a community health management system needs to select the priorities, make decisions and create a community-wide population health learning system.Cultural. ... Technical.
What are the 3 core functions of public health?
This page and graphic show how the ten essential environmental health services align with the three core functions of public health (assessment, policy development, and assurance).
Why is the history of public health important?
An understanding of the rich and diverse history of public health cannot only support contemporary innovation but can help reduce the risk of public health practice being too narrowly focused on specific influences on the health of individuals rather than maintaining an overview of the full range of factors at work ...
What did the public health Act of 1848 do?
The Public Health Act 1848 established the General Board of Health, which was responsible for advising on public health matters such as epidemics and disease prevention. It was also empowered with establishing and managing local boards of health.
When was the US public health Service founded quizlet?
US Public Health service was established in 1798 as the Marine Hospital Service when President John Adams signed into law an act providing for the care and relief of seamen who were sick or disabled.......
When did public health nursing start in America?
Nursing, History, and Health Care 1890Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement (1893) in New York City, invented the term public health nursing to put emphasis on the community value of the nurse whose work was built upon an understanding of all the problems that invariably accompanied the ills of the poor.
When was the first public health agency established?
This report eventually led to the establishment of the first public agency for health, the New York City Health Department, in 1866. During this same period, boards of health were established in Louisiana, California, the District of Columbia, Virginia, Minnesota, Maryland, and Alabama.
What is the chapter 1 of A History of the Public Health System?
In Chapter 1, the committee found that the current public health system must play a critical role in handling major threats to the public health, but that this system is currently in disarray. Chapter 2 explained the committee's ideal for ...
What is the link between science, the development of interventions, and organization of public authorities to employ interventions?
The link between science, the development of interventions, and organization of public authorities to employ interventions was increased public understanding of and social commitment to enhancing health. The growth of a public system for protecting health depended both on scientific discovery and social action.
How did sanitation change the world?
Sanitation also changed the way society thought about public responsibility for citizen's health. Protecting health became a social responsibility. Disease control continued to focus on epidemics, but the manner of controlling turned from quarantine and isolation of the individual to cleaning up and improving the common environment. And disease control shifted from reacting to intermittent outbreaks to continuing measures for prevention. With sanitation, public health became a societal goal and protecting health became a public activity.
How has the public health system changed over the years?
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. As understanding of sources of contagion and means of controlling disease became more refined, more effective interventions against health threats were developed. Public organizations and agencies were formed to employ newly discovered interventions against health threats. As scientific knowledge grew, public authorities expanded to take on new tasks, including sanitation, immunization, regulation, health education, and personal health care. (Chave, 1984; Fee, 1987)
Why is understanding of disease important in public health?
Understanding of disease made public measures to alleviate pain and suffering possible, and social values about the worthiness of this goal made public measures feasible . The history of the public health system is a history of bringing knowledge and values together in the public arena to shape an approach to health problems.
Who published the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of New York?
And Shattuck established the fundamental usefulness of keeping records and vital statistics. Similarly, in New York, John Griscom published The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of New York in 1848.
When was the first marine hospital built?
The first permanent marine hospital was authorized to be built in Boston, MA in 1803. In 1870 a bill was passed to centralized and reorganize the Marine Hospital Service, with its headquarters in Washington DC under the position of supervising surgeon. The act also raised the hospital tax from twenty cents to forty cents until 1884.
When did the Marine Hospital Service expand?
In 1902 the Marine Hospital Service expanded to the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service to reflect growing responsibilities. Officers continued to carry out quarantine duties, which included the medical inspection of arriving immigrants, such as those landing at Ellis Island in New York.
What was the role of the PHS in the Second World War?
With the approach of the second world war, the programs of the PHS began to emphasize on military preparedness. In 1941 when the U.S Coast Guard was militarized, the PHS went to war as well. From 1941 – 1945, 663 medical, dental, engineer and nurse officer served with the Coast Guard, many sustaining injuries and four of them losing their lives. The war had an enormous impact on the PHS. Not only did the war require expansion of its programs and personnel, but the PHS Act of 1944.
How did the PHS Act impact the war?
The war had an enormous impact on the PHS. Not only did the war require expansion of its programs and personnel, but the PHS Act of 1944. The PHS Act of 1944 broadened the scope of the Commissioned Corps, allowing the commissioning of nurses, scientists, dieticians, physical therapists, sanitarians and veterinarians.
What was the role of the Marine Hospital Service?
The Public Health and Marine Hospital Service officers played a major role in fulfilling the commitment to prevent disease from entering the country. In August 1912, congress passed a law that finally change the name of the service to the Public Health Service (PHS).
What is the USPHS?
The history of the U.S public Health Service provide great overview why officers of the U.S Public Health Service (USPHS) wear uniform, bear military ranking and considered one of the nation’s seven uniform services.
Where was the first hospital for merchant sailors?
In 1801, the first hospital fully dedicated to the care of merchant sailors was purchased at Washington Post near Norfolk, VA. Other early marine hospitals were established in the port cities of Boston, MA, Newport, RI, New Orleans, LA, and Charleston, SC. The first permanent marine hospital was authorized to be built in Boston, MA in 1803.
Who defined public health?
Public health was defined by the American public health leader, Charles-Edward A. Winslow, in 1920 as, "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical health and efficiency through organized community efforts for the sanitation of the environment, the control of community infections, the education of the individual in principles of personal hygiene, the organization of medical and nursing service for the early diagnosis and preventive treatment of disease, and the development of the social machinery which will ensure to every individual in the community a standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health." Although a modern nosologist would add mental to physical aspects of health, Winslow's definition has not been superseded. It provided the basis for the World Health Organization 's definition of health: "A state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity" (1948).
How did voluntary health agencies evolve?
Voluntary health agencies evolved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and North America, growing out of the failure of public health organizations to fully apply knowledge created by the new biomedical sciences, and by the continuing deplorable condition of the urban poor. Organizations like the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis (which evolved into the American Lung Association) took on the task of public education, case counseling, financial aid, and advocacy for relevant legislative action, while organizations like the Henry Street Settlement in New York City and Hull House in Chicago provided social and medical services in slum neighborhoods. By the mid – twentieth century there were more than 20,000 voluntary health agencies in the United States alone.
What are the elements of Winslow's concept of public health?
Elements of Winslow's concept of public health can be found in the earliest evidence of communal living. Paleopathology, the study of fossils and other artifacts, reveals that early Homo sapiens, who were hunter-gatherers, suffered from essentially the same diseases that afflict people today.
Why do people get infections from food?
Even today, for example, Escherichia coli infections of food and between people are still commonly caused by poor hygienic practices, such as the failure to properly wash hands after toileting.
What is the definition of health?
It provided the basis for the World Health Organization 's definition of health: "A state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity " (1948).
Why was the first medical school founded?
This institution, founded in the eleventh or twelfth century, was particularly remarkable for two reasons: It was a lay organization, independent of the church , and it welcomed students of any race or creed. Its faculty included women, who apparently dealt with obstetric issues, and the renowned peripatetic scholar, Constantine the African (1020 – 1087), who translated many important Arabic works into Latin. Its most prominent literary product was the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, a lengthy poem, prescribing healthy habits from birth to old age. Drawing on the whole corpus of Greco-Roman and Arabian medical writings the Regimen emphasized personal hygiene, diet, exercise, and temperance. It was the first "health guide" for the masses.
When did Italy start using bills of mortality?
By early in the fifteenth century, the Italian boards of health instituted a system of death registration, first for contagious diseases and subsequently for all diseases. The resulting bills of mortality have provided continuous data on mortality in Italy from the Renaissance to the present. In seventeenth-century London, analysis of bills of mortality by John Graunt in his epochal treatise Natural and Political Observations … Made Upon the Bills of Mortality (1662) laid the basis for the modern use of statistics for the planning and evaluation of public health activities.
When was the first public health organization founded?
In the United States, the first public health organization based on a state health department and local boards of health was founded in New York City in 1866.
When was the Public Health Service established?
As the system's scope grew to include quarantine authority and research, it was renamed the Public Health Service in 1912. A series of reorganizations in 1966–1973 began a shift where PHS' divisions were promoted into departmental operating agencies, with PHS itself becoming a thin layer of hierarchy above them rather than an operating agency in its own right. In 1995, PHS agencies were shifted to report directly to the Secretary of Health and Human Services rather the Assistant Secretary for Health, eliminating PHS as an administrative level in the organizational hierarchy.
What is public health?
Public health has been defined as "the science and art of preventing disease ”, prolonging life and improving quality of life through organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations (public and private), communities and individuals.
Why is health aid important?
Health aid to developing countries is an important source of public health funding for many developing countries. Health aid to developing countries has shown a significant increase after World War II as concerns over the spread of disease as a result of globalization increased and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa surfaced. From 1990 to 2010, total health aid from developed countries increased from 5.5 billion to 26.87 billion with wealthy countries continuously donating billions of dollars every year with the goal of improving population health. Some efforts, however, receive a significantly larger proportion of funds such as HIV which received an increase in funds of over $6 billion between 2000 and 2010 which was more than twice the increase seen in any other sector during those years. Health aid has seen an expansion through multiple channels including private philanthropy, non-governmental organizations, private foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, bilateral donors, and multilateral donors such as the World Bank or UNICEF. The result has been a sharp rise in uncoordinated and fragmented funding of an ever-increasing number of initiatives and projects. To promote better strategic cooperation and coordination between partners, particularly among bilateral development agencies and funding organizations, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) spearheaded the establishment of ESSENCE, an initiative to facilitate dialogue between donors/funders, allowing them to identify synergies. ESSENCE brings together a wide range of funding agencies to coordinate funding efforts.
How can we prevent diseases?
Many diseases are preventable through simple, nonmedical methods. For example, research has shown that the simple act of handwashing with soap can prevent the spread of many contagious diseases. In other cases, treating a disease or controlling a pathogen can be vital to preventing its spread to others, either during an outbreak of infectious disease or through contamination of food or water supplies. Public health communications programs, vaccination programs and distribution of condoms are examples of common preventive public health measures.
What are the major health concerns in developing countries?
A major public health concern in developing countries is poor maternal and child health, exacerbated by malnutrition and poverty. From the beginnings of human civilization, communities promoted health and fought disease at the population level.
How is public health achieved?
Public health aims are achieved through surveillance of cases and the promotion of healthy behaviors, communities and environments. Analyzing the determinants of health of a population and the threats it faces is the basis for public health. Many diseases are preventable through simple, nonmedical methods.
What is public health?
Public health, the art and science of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical and mental health, sanitation, personal hygiene, control of infectious diseases, and organization of health services. From the normal human interactions involved in dealing with the many problems of social life, there has emerged a recognition ...
What is public health medicine?
Public health medicine is part of the greater enterprise of preserving and improving the public health. Community physicians cooperate with diverse groups, from architects, builders, sanitary and heating and ventilating engineers, and factory and food inspectors to psychologists and sociologists, chemists, physicists, and toxicologists.
Why did ancient people practice cleanliness?
Most of the world’s ancient peoples practiced cleanliness and personal hygiene, often for religious reasons, including, apparently, a wish to be pure in the eyes of their gods. The Bible, for example, has many adjurations and prohibitions about clean and unclean living.
What were the measures of public health in the Middle Ages?
Historical public health measures included quarantine of leprosy victims in the Middle Ages and efforts to improve sanitation following the 14th-century plague epidemics. Population increases in Europe brought with them increased awareness of infant deaths and a proliferation of hospitals.
What is the venture of preserving, maintaining, and actively promoting public health?
The venture of preserving, maintaining, and actively promoting public health requires special methods of information-gathering ( epidemiology) and corporate arrangements to act upon significant findings and put them into practice.
Which organization is responsible for public health?
Internationally, the World Health Organization (WHO) plays an equivalent role.
What is occupational medicine?
Occupational medicine is concerned with the health, safety, and welfare of persons in the workplace. It may be viewed as a specialized part of public health medicine since its aim is to reduce the risks in the environment in which persons work.
When did public health start?
We often think of public health as a new field, however, it actually began to professionalize during the early 1900s. The road was not easy, though. Public health had to define itself as a profession unique from nursing and medicine at a time when those fields were expanding and changing. In order to understand how challenging it was to separate public health from other existing professions, we have to understand that at the start of the 20th century, “public health” meant something different than what it does today. Early public health practice often referred to the health of poor people or those who did not have regular access to medical care. It is under this early definition that public health was generally practiced by physicians and nurses. Today, however, our understanding of public health goes far beyond that, encompassing bioethics, population and family health, the sociology of medicine, epidemiology, and my own subfield of health policy and management.
Who was the first public health nurse?
One of the early pioneers of Public Health Nursing, whose name may be familiar to you if you’ve studied public health, was Lillian D. Wald. Wald was the first president of the National Organization for Public Health Nursing and she pushed for nurses in public schools, sanitation efforts, and education. It’s interesting to think about the populations that she was helping in those days of intense immigration and education boom. I think it is safe to say that many of the challenges she encountered are echoed in today’s public health dialogue. She also helped found Columbia University’s School of Nursing where there’s still a necessary overlap with public health and policy in the curriculum for nursing students. Work like hers reveals an early emphasis on health literacy in the public health community and how environmental factors were seen in relation to health.
What was the era of the country doctor and the visiting nurse?
In the early years of the 20th century, the era of the country doctor and the visiting nurse who practiced public health began to disappear as the medical and nursing professions became more defined. Medical training became more rigorous, and specialization more common in light of the seminal Flexner Report, a book-length study that indicted the education of medical professionals. Nursing became a popular profession, and as hospitals proliferated, so too did the number of nurses. With traditional practitioners increasingly unavailable outside of hospitals, public health, began to distinguish itself with the help of a few key female visionaries from the fields of medicine and nursing who saw a need for a new field of health care.
When did the public health service start?
From from the US National Library of Medicine's web pages on The History of the Public Health Service: "The working environment and its effect on worker's health became a major area of study for the Public Health Service starting in 1910.
When was the first health department established?
1799 - Boston establishes the first board of health and the first health department in the United States.
Why were seamen unable to find health care in port cities?
Seamen often became ill while at sea and often were unable to find adequate health care in port cities. Their health was viewed as essential to the developing country, and a network of marine hospitals, mainly in port cities, was established by Congress in 1798 to care for sick and disabled seamen.
What was the name of the public health service that was created in the 1700s?
The 1700s. 1798 - Congress passes the Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen and authorizes formation of the US Marine Hospital Service (MHS), which was the forerunner of the Public Health Service. Seamen often became ill while at sea and often were unable to find adequate health care in port cities.
What was the name of the hospital in 1902?
The Marine Hospital Service was renamed the Public Health and Marine Hospital Services (PHMHS) to reflect its broader scope.
What was the first school of public health in the United States?
1916 - Johns Hopkins University founds the first school of public health in the the United States with a grant of $267,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation later supported schools of public health at Harvard and the University of Michigan. 1918 - The influenza pandemic of 1918 struck.
What was the PHMHS?
1912 - The PHMHS was renamed the United States Public Health Service, and it was authorized to investigate human diseases such as, tuberculosis, hookworm, malaria, and leprosy), sanitation, water supplies and sewage disposal.
What is public health?
" [Public health is] the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals.”
When did medical statistics start?
Medical statistics emerged as a distinct discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. Physicians in Western Europe became interested in statistics earlier than their American counterparts. They began using statistical analysis in the 1820s to study social problems produced by the Industrial Revolution, a transition that Europe experienced earlier than the United States. Statistics were seen as tools to address epidemic diseases, crime, urban poverty, and other issues arising in industrial societies. In 1834 the Royal Statistical Society was organized in London. It became a global leader in the application of statistical analysis in public health.
Why is data important in public health?
Data and statistics are essential to public health, where knowledge of large populations is used to evaluate and reduce health threats. Broadly defined, data are facts collected together to use for research, reference, and analysis. In the field of statistics, numerical data is analyzed to make inferences about a large number of subjects. Historically, advances in the field of public health can be linked to increasing application of statistics and data analysis.
When was the first bacteriology lab in Oregon?
Bacteriology laboratory at the University of Oregon Medical School, 1930s (Historical Image Collection) By the 1890s, bacteriology laboratories appeared in many cities across the country. Cortes H. Wheeler, M.D. established a city bacteriology laboratory in Portland in 1898.
Who was the first person to use statistics to determine the source of cholera outbreak in London?
In 1854, the physician John Snow used statistics drawn from maps and mortality data to determine the source of a cholera outbreak in London, and convince local officials to improve the public water system. His work founded the modern field of epidemiology.
Who founded the American Statistical Society?
Five years later the American Statistical Society was established in Boston by Lemuel Shattuck and Edward Jarvis, M.D. Shattuck, a school teacher and publisher, realized the potential of statistics in analyzing public health problems and, in turn, influencing sanitary reform. He was largely responsible for starting the Massachusetts system ...
Why was the bacteriology laboratory important?
The bacteriology laboratory became an important public health institution at the turn of the century.
The Dawn of History to The Fall of Rome
- Elements of Winslow's concept of public health can be found in the earliest evidence of communal living. Paleopathology, the study of fossils and other artifacts, reveals that early Homo sapiens, who were hunter-gatherers, suffered from essentially the same diseases that afflict people today. In remote parts of the world—in the Amazon, Indonesia, A...
The Dark Ages and The Medieval Period
- During the Dark Ages (about 500–1000 c.e.), Western Europe experienced a period of social and political disintegration. Large cities disappeared, replaced by small villages surrounding the castles of feudal chiefs. The only unifying force was Christianity, and it was in the monasteries that the learning and culture of the Greco-Roman world was preserved. Furthermore, in many of thes…
The Renaissance and The Plague Centuries
- It was during the Renaissance, a period of great commercial, scientific, cultural, and political development, that the bubonic plague, or "Black Death," swept over Europe and the Near East killing an estimated one-fourth to one-third of the population between 1347 and 1351. For the following two-and-a-half centuries, periodic epidemics of plague decimated these populations. T…
The Enlightenment and Sanitary Reform
- The Enlightenment (the period from 1750 until the mid–nineteenth century) was characterized by unprecedented industrial, social, and political developments, and the resulting societal impacts were immense, culminating in the Industrial Revolution. It was in Germany that the first major contribution of the period to public health occurred. Between 1779 and 1816, Johann Peter Fran…
Bacteriology
- With the discoveries of pathogenic bacteria by Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Kochin Germany in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the science of microbiology was born. Consequent developments in immunology and parasitology provided epidemiologists and other public health workers with the tools to study and understand epidemic phenomena. Sanitation could become …
Colonialism and Public Health
- From the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, European countries had competitively colonized most of the tropical world. The contagious diseases they brought with them frequently ravaged indigenous populations. Conversely, the prevalent diseases of colonized areas threatened the invaders. Colonial sanitation and medical care was originally designed to serve t…
The Early Twentieth Century
- Although the Sanitary movement of the nineteenth century and the development of bacteriology substantially lowered death rates from enteric diseases, other serious health problems still existed. One was the appalling and ubiquitous rate of infant mortality. First in Europe, then in Britain and in the United States, maternal and child health programs were initiated with an emph…
The Late Twentieth Century
- In the last half of the twentieth century, public health continued to expand its established roles. However, new forces were at work to further broaden its purview. Among these were the aging of the populations in industrialized regions, recognition of the importance of behavioral factors in determining the health of populations, exacerbation of social inequalities in health, increasing vio…
Bibliography
- Acheson, D. A. (1998). Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health: Report.London: The Stationery Office. Ackerknecht, E. H. (1982). A Short History of Medicine. Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press. Chadwick, E. (1843). The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Classes.London: W. Clowes. Cipolla, C. M. (1976). Public Health and the Medical Profession in t…
Overview
Public health has been defined as "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals". Analyzing the determinants of health of a population and the threats it faces is the basis for public health. The public can be as small as a handful of …
Priority areas
When public health initiatives began to emerge in England in modern times (18th century onwards) there were three core strands of public health which were all related to statecraft: Supply of clean water and sanitation (for example London sewerage system); control of infectious diseases (including vaccination and quarantine); an evolving infrastructure of various sciences, e.g. statistics, microbiology, epidemiology, sciences of engineering. Great Britain was a leader in the …
Definitions and purposes
Public health has been defined as "the science and art of preventing disease", prolonging life and improving quality of life through organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations (public and private), communities and individuals. The public can be as small as a handful of people or as large as a village or an entire city. The concept of health takes into account physical, psychological, and social …
Methods
Public health aims are achieved through surveillance of cases and the promotion of healthy behaviors, communities and environments. Analyzing the determinants of health of a population and the threats it faces is the basis for public health.
Many diseases are preventable through simple, nonmedical methods. For example, research has shown that the simple act of handwashing with soap ca…
Ethics
A dilemma in public health ethics is dealing with the conflict between individual rights and maximizing right to health. Public health is justified by consequentialist utilitarian ideas, but is constrained and critiqued by liberal, deontological, principlist and libertarian philosophies Stephen Holland argues that it can be easy to find a particular framework to justify any viewpoint on public health issues, but that the correct approach is to find a framework that best describes a situatio…
Current practice
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution, which establishes the agency's governing structure and principles, states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health". The WHO's broad mandate includes advocating for universal healthca…
Global perspectives
There is a significant disparity in access to health care and public health initiatives between developed countries and developing countries, as well as within developing countries. In developing countries, public health infrastructures are still forming. There may not be enough trained health workers, monetary resources or, in some cases, sufficient knowledge to provide even a …
History
From the beginnings of human civilization, communities promoted health and fought disease at the population level. Definitions of health as well as methods to pursue it differed according to the medical, religious and natural-philosophical ideas groups held, the resources they had, and the changing circumstances in which they lived. Yet few early societies displayed the hygienic stagnation or e…