There Is No Public Health without Environmental Health | Dean's Note

This week, we will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the doctoral program in environmental health at SPH. Many of our alumni will be joining us on November 1-2 to tell us about the work they are doing and to connect with current students, staff, and faculty. This milestone naturally leads to thoughts about where the field of environmental health has been, where it is going, and its role in public health.

In a 2016 Dean’s Note on the aspirations and strategies of public health, George Annas and I wrote, “Public health continues to be about the conditions that make people healthy.” These conditions are largely social, economic, political, and environmental. Since then, I have written often on the many ways the health of our environment shapes the health of populations—through examples like climate change and natural disasters, and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. These examples speak to the fundamental immediacy of environmental health, how the conditions of the natural and human-made world around us shape our health each day in often profound ways. When our environment is safe, clean, and sustainable, health is able to thrive. When it is not, health cannot help but suffer.

The Public's Health: Can We Promote Public Health and Generate Return on Our Investment? | Public Health Post

It is widely recognized that the United States spends far more on health, or perhaps more accurately, on medical care than any other country on earth. This leads to a considerable amount of hand-wringing, and also some well-considered ideas about how we can spend our medicine dollars better. While most thinking about how we may best spend our health dollars features, at heart, some scenario of greater spending on prevention, our health spending remains resolutely curative. Of the $3.3 trillion spent on health in 2016, only about 2% of that was spent on classic public health activities such as disease monitoring and surveillance.

We might suggest that this is misaligned with what we really want for our own and our children’s lives. To put it more prosaically, wouldn’t we rather never develop Alzheimer’s than receive treatment for our Alzheimer’s once we get it? Few people ever express a preference for cure over prevention. 

Professional graduate degrees are not inferior | Times Higher Education

Professional graduate degrees in the US have long been seen as the poor cousins of their academic counterparts.

There is a persistent perception that degrees focusing on specific careers are formulaic, their content dictated by accrediting bodies and lacking in innovative thought or pedagogy. Higher education literature suggests that they do not contribute to intellectual development and have to balance a tension between intellectual development and preparing students for jobs. And academics view them as mere money-makers for their institutions, far removed from the pride of place occupied by academic degrees, which prepare students for a life of research and scholarship.

Learning from Hurricane Michael: Charity Will Not Make Us Healthy. Compassion Will. | Fortune

Last week, Hurricane Michael struck the Florida panhandle and parts of Virginia, killing at least 16 people and leaving behind a trail of devastation. In the wake of the storm, Americans have done what they always do after large-scale traumatic events—they have mobilized their resources to help the victims, donating money, blood, food, and time, to aid recovery efforts.

Such charity is a fairly common American response to witnessing the need of others, one that is widely shared. In the corporate world, for instance, we often see high-profile examples of charity, where the powerful use their resources to assist those who lack wealth and influence—from Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to help New Jersey schools, to the Giving Pledge, a commitment by the world’s wealthiest people, including the late Paul Allen, to use their money for philanthropy. And setting aside those who have great wealth, most of the rest of us also feel the urge to do good, and will give generously to improve life for the people we encounter.

How We Define “Freedom” Matters for Our Health | Dean's Note

In the United States, we place a high premium on freedom, and on the legal extension of that freedom—rights. It is telling that the Tea Party resistance to the agenda of Barack Obama, and the progressive resistance to the Trump administration, while sharing little in common ideologically, are united by their reverence for rights, and by their concerns about losing them. In the case of the Tea Party, these rights notably include the right to bear arms and the right to assemble and speak freely; on the left, the emphasis has been on issues like the right to safe reproductive care and pay equity, and the right of workers to unionize. Notably, all of these rights are rights “to”—this is to say, they represent our freedom to perform an action or access a resource that benefits us, and, in most but not all cases, enriches our civil society. But there is another kind of right—rights that are founded on the basis of freedom “from.” These include the right to live free from socioeconomic insecurity, or from the threat of environmental disaster, or from the hazard of preventable injury and disease.

The Public's Health: Three Notes on the Opioid Crisis | Public Health Post

We are in the midst of the greatest American health crisis of this young century, an opioid epidemic that has now led to an astounding 500,000 deaths in the past two decades. There has been substantial ink—appropriately—devoted to this issue, we think there are three areas that receive far less attention than they should. One relates to the silent, concurrent increase in other substance use that is happening, the second relates to who we believe is affected by opioids, and the third to our best hope of stemming this crisis.

A 'Yes' On Question 3 Is A Vote For Public Health | Cognoscenti

This November, Massachusetts voters will be given the chance to repeal a state law banning discrimination against transgender people in places of public accommodation.

The law, passed in 2016, guarantees transgender people the same access to spaces like bathrooms, sports arenas, restaurants, movies theaters and parks enjoyed by populations who are less vulnerable to exclusion and harassment. The option of repeal will be presented to voters as Question 3 on the Nov. 6 ballot. A “no” vote will repeal the law, a “yes” will keep it in place.

Will Disruptive Innovation in Health Care Improve the Health of Populations? | The Milbank Quarterly

Health care in the United States is long overdue for an upheaval. The mismatch between costs, by far the highest in the world, and health outcomes, among the worst in the high‐income world, has long been glaring. Perhaps the good news is that the time for such an upheaval has come. At least 4 forces have been gathering steam, each promising to change the nature of health care and, in so doing, influence population health.

This is the personal website of Sandro Galea. All photos are taken by Sandro Galea.