Revising Public Health Practice
Why we still have a long way to go before public health practice, let alone policy, is of a reasonable quality.
Sanitation, vaccines, control of various environmental factors that affect health, and much more have greatly improved our quality of life and our average lifespan. But while public health practice has come a long way, there are still numerous areas of improvement. Not only must public health practice improve in terms of communication with the public, but we must also work on improving how quickly scientific knowledge is used to update public health practice. Additionally, public health policy involving zoonotic disease (diseases which are contracted from animals) and protection of the health of livestock and pets, also requires serious attention.
Pseudoscience
The antivax movement, the push for homeopathy, and great deal of other pseudoscientific movements are hurting public health practice. While there’s still lot that we do not know about recent outbreaks of various diseases such as measles and whooping cough, medical science absolutely justifies the use of vaccines in the prevention of dangerous symptoms associated with these diseases. Meanwhile, the link between vaccines and autism has long since been debunked, and yet a large portion of the…
