An Overview about My Education in Public Health

Welcome to my first ever blog made specifically for a class!  I’m Eric Wan, and this blog will be primarily for discussing public health, under the guidance of my Introduction to Public Health course.

Today, I will talk about why I’m interested in public health, what I’ve learned in class so far, what I hope to get out of this course, and what my interests are in public health.

So, why Introduction to Public Health?   Public Health began to interest me only when I sought to learn more about it.  After my sophomore year in high school, I attended an Epidemiology course at Johns Hopkins’s Center for Talented Youth.  The course taught me a lot about the goals and methods of Epidemiology (I fondly call it “Epi.”)  Little did I know, Epi at CTY would get me hooked into public health.

But something else also happened during high school.  I took an International Human Rights course that showed me several cases of public health inequities (Gaza strip running out of water, for example).  This brought human significance to the field of public health, beyond just goals and methods on paper.

So here I am today, deepening my knowledge about public health in the hope that I can begin to view the world from the perspective of public health.  But to see from the eyes of public health, I had to first understand what public health even is.

Public health is multidisciplinary with its goal to promote and facilitate healthy living.  The CDC puts it as “[promoting] health and quality of life.”  When we dissect the term “public health,” we get two constituent parts (public and health). 

“Public” means that all levels of the government are engaged in promoting peoples’ well-being.  To have “health” requires acceptable environments, good nutrition and good behaviors, etc.  Together, these two constituent parts indicate that for public health to be successful, it requires government participation in ensuring peoples’ health.

A novel idea I learned in class is that public health deals with disparities, and eliminating them.  Dr. Miriam Alexander, a course instructor, told us that health is proportional to wealth (more money equals better health) and that public health is no longer a problem about the lack of treatments, but rather, it is about the problem of not being able to access those treatments. 

After I heard this, I finally understood what was going on in public health; furthermore, I finally understand Dr. Paul Farmer’s books!  Public health is really about eliminating the disparities (socioeconomic, access, education) that prevent destitute populations from getting the healthcare they need.  And governments need to be involved in eliminating disparities.

Insights like this are what make this course so exciting!  I’m hoping this course will change all my preconceptions and inspire me to think cleverly about future public health.

In the future, I hope to study diseases that are important to developing nations.  AIDS is a popular one, but tuberculosis is still an issue, especially extreme-drug-resistant tuberculosis.  I’m also intrigued and perplexed by the disparities that prevent modern medicine from reaching these populations (inequalities that harm health are just not right.)

Stay with me on my public health journey!

Eric Wan