New Public Health Measures Essay 

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. New Public Health Measures Essay Paper

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.