Successful Public Health

The world around us is changing.  As it changes, so too must changes to our public health goals and targets occur.  Every decade the CDC puts together a list of the ten greatest public health achievements of the past ten years, showcasing how public health has advanced to conquer new and old problems.  This report focused on the years of 2001-2010. 

The first major achievement was the work against vaccine-preventable diseases, where the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine and rotavirus were the biggest successes.  Next up was the prevention and control of infectious diseases.  For example, many strides have been made in catching contaminated food products early.  For tobacco, there has been a slowing decline in use.  Many advances have been made for maternal and infant health, such as technological improvements for newborn screening.  Continued efforts are being made in the field of motor vehicle safety.  Cardiovascular disease and cancer prevention have also seen great improvements over the decade.  Much progress was made for workplace safety and worker care.  The war against lead has caused declines in lead poisoning nationwide.  Finally, given the many terrorist events, natural disasters, and disease breakouts, the public health infrastructure has been radically revamped to be more prepared and proactive.

I enjoyed the article, finding it very informative.  However, I do find myself skeptical of a few statistics, mainly those saying something like “rates declined from 2002-2006”.  I found myself asking, well what happened after 2006?  Is there still a decline or are things actually taking a turn for the worse and the incidence of the problem is rising?  It just seems odd to me that they would not show statistics all the way through to 2010.  Of course, this may just be because of lack of information, but my skepticism still remains.

The two problems that I found to be most interesting were tobacco use and vehicle safety.  While I do have emotional ties to both issues, having lost my grandmother to lung cancer and having gone through a severe car accident myself, my reasons for taking a lot from these two issues stems from something else entirely.  I find these issues to be a little silly because they are so preventable, deriving mostly from human error and poor choices.  In fact, I find it odd that smoking is still such a large problem, but know this has a lot to do with money and lobbyist.  As for cars, I realize that no matter how much public health does, vehicles will always be dangerous because the people behind the wheels make mistakes and poor choices.

An issue that I would like to see in the next issue of the CDC public health report would be the obesity epidemic.  The problem here is that across the country more and more people are passing the obesity mark on the BMI scale.  This problem is again mostly preventable by human choice.  I think we are already on the right track with strong advocacy for the issue and changes in eating habits, such as more organic foods.  A big problem, though, is that fast food is more convenient and sometimes cheaper than eating nutritious food from the market.  One way then to possibly attack the obesity epidemic would be to put a higher tax on fast food.  Of course, there are many ways to deal with this and I hope to see new practices put into place in the following years.