- Vaccination
- Motor-vehicle safety
- Safer workplaces
- Control of infectious diseases
- Decline in deaths from coronary heart disease and stroke
- Safer and healthier foods
- Healthier mothers and babies
- Family Planning
- Fluoridation of drinking water
- Recognition of tobacco use as a health hazard
These are great achievements indeed! Vaccinations have been extremely successful against diseases such as polio, smallpox and chickenpox; fluoridation of drinking water has greatly augmented our health; and seatbelts have saved countless lives. But it’s surprising how many of these achievements go without recognition. To me, that is a sign of success; when you can influence the nation to adopt something into the mainstream culture and have it last long enough without debate…that is a successful policy. But again, we take so many of them for granted, and we do this even when they aren’t available for the majority of the world (is that really success then? I’ll come back to this.)
Two of the achievements I find interesting are “control of infectious disease” and “safer and healthier foods.” Infectious disease control interests me because I enjoy studying the interactions of other microbes/organisms with our body. Infectious disease is also still extremely relevant in today’s world of vaccines and antimicrobial therapy. Even though the US has made great advances in reducing infections of TB, STDs and Cholera, this is not so true for all developing countries. For example, in Haiti and Ghana, TB still has high prevalence despite public health advancements in the US.
Safe and healthy foods is also an interesting topic because of the recent movement to shed light on issues like factory farming, organic foods and foodborne illnesses. However, the safe and healthy foods that the article talks about are safe and healthy because of advancements made in adding nutritional content to food and decreasing microbial contamination through sanitation techniques, etc. (Think about Sinclair’s The Jungle and the establishment of the FDA.) However, again, in developing nations how effective is food safety, and even more, food security? This would be an interesting issue to look into.
I feel like the article missed the Clean Air Act 1963. The Clean Air Act is important because it allowed for all levels of government to discuss air pollution and to set up research and control programs in order to benefit public health through regulations. The act is being constantly improved, and we already know that it has been successful.
All the achievements listed are successful. So now what I’d like to see is that list become a list of achievements of global health (ensuring the US achievements of 1900s reach the furthest corners of the globe.) Only then can we claim true success for humanity.
Eric Wan
Eric,
ReplyDeleteGood comments. I think you bring up some really good points about how the US has been able to make such great strides while many other countries around the world are left battling with diseases and infections we rarely see here.
Something else that is interesting is that the article brings up infant and maternal mortality. While the rates in the US have declined significantly over the 100 year period being discussed the US still doesn't do so well when compared to other developed countries, despite the fact that we spend so much more per capita on health care.