The Case for a 'Health New Deal' | Fortune

In recent weeks, talk of a Green New Deal has moved to the center of our political debate. The Green New Deal aims to address climate change by tackling the underlying socioeconomic inequities that gave rise to the crisis. It calls for overhauling the country’s transportation system, providing universal healthcare, creating a federal jobs guarantee, investing in infrastructure, and other goals.

This ambition echoes the scope of the original New Deal, another wide-ranging political program that was born out of crisis. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt and his allies used the shock of the Great Depression to transform the relationship between government and citizen through a series of reforms addressing the injustices at the heart of the economic crisis.

The Public's Health: Zero Tolerance for Preventable Deaths | Public Health Post

Of the approximately 150,000 daily deaths around the world, about a third, or 50,000 or so, are preventable (the rest are age-related, hence non-preventable). In the United States more than 400,000 people die annually due to smoking and more than 300,000 due to poor diet, the leading causes of preventable deaths.
 
The good news is that the number of preventable causes of death is improving in the US. Preventable deaths from cancer, injuries, stroke, and heart disease decreased by 25, 23, 11, and 4 percent respectively in the first five years of this decade. We also know that we can reduce the number of deaths from preventable causes further. An analysis conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found that if we were to reduce the number of deaths across all states to the levels found in the best three states we would save 91,891 deaths from diseases of the heart, 84,539 from cancer, 37,016 from unintentional injuries, 28,853 from chronic lower respiratory diseases, and 17,062 from stroke for a total of more than 250,000 deaths annually, or nearly 10% of annual deaths in the US.

The Mental and Physical Health of Caregivers | Psychology Today

In a 2017 Health Affairs piece, Peter Buerhaus, David Auerbach, and Douglas Staiger discussed an approaching healthcare challenge—the reality that many nurses of the Baby Boomer generation will soon retire, creating a shortage of experience among the remaining RN workforce. The article caused me to reflect on the broader condition of caregivers in the US, particularly that of non-professional caregivers, who face many of the same scenarios that confront professional nurses but must do so without the training and expertise of the experienced RNs who will soon leave the healthcare field. As these caregivers play an ever-greater role in safeguarding the health of our aging population, a note on the physical and mental health of caregivers, and how public health can best support these individuals, and, by extension, the populations they care for.

The Public's Health: Food Justice | Public Health Post

One in six of our citizens experiences food insecurity. Forty-two million low income and working-class Americans—most of whom are elderly, disabled, or children—use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to buy groceries. That is, they don’t earn enough to feed themselves consistently. Food insecurity has dramatic effects on the health of children and the elderly in particular, influencing educational progress, family stress, and nutritional deficiencies. 

At the same time we throw away 40% of our food every day. That’s 400 pounds per person per year.

What the Recent—and Maybe Future—Shutdown Teaches Us About Wealth in the U.S. | Fortune

The U.S. just emerged from the longest government shutdown in its history, and was on the brink of another shutdown that could start again in a week. Much has been written about the human costs of the shutdown, which include the halting of critical government services like food safety inspections.

While the temporary loss of these functions was bad for all of us, the harm of the shutdown was most acutely felt by the roughly 800,000 federal workers who were forced to go for weeks without a paycheck. Many of these workers were already socioeconomically vulnerable—the average federal worker’s salary is 32 percent lower than that of private sector workers.

Additionally, close to one in five federal workers are black, a population with significant economic challenges of its own. Centrally, black Americans are more than twice as likely as their white peers to have a net worth of zero or negative zero. And they have far less wealth, accumulating just seven percent of the wealth enjoyed by white Americans.

The Public's Health: Police and the Public's Health | Public Health Post

Police work is community work. Performed on the street, in public settings and private homes, police work shapes the health context of cities and neighborhoods, and affects the lives and behaviors of countless citizens. While there has been much concern in recent years—appropriately—about how some police activity has harmed health, particularly among minority communities, it is worth focusing on the potential for police work to improve the health of the public.
 
Most police interaction with the public does not involve major crimes or violence that requires arrest or use of force. Police beat work is filled with low intensity interactions in which officers serve as problem‐solvers. We think of this as public health work; police are one of the forces that generate health in many places.  
 

The Public's Health: In Social Media We Trust | Public Health Post

We have grown accustomed to social media reading our thoughts. One day we are using Facebook to exchange notes about an upcoming wedding invitation, and the next day Facebook ads highlight discounts on potential wedding gifts. We post photos of a new item of clothing on Instagram and next we are receiving ads from the newest crop of design stars.
 
Of course our social media apps are not reading our thoughts—they are reading our photos, shopping patterns, and the actual words we write in our emails and posts. We have come to think of this type of targeted advertising as unremarkable, even as, in recent years, we have become aware of the potential havoc this type of micro-targeting can wreak on our democratic process.

The Public's Health: The Illusion of Clinical Success | Public Health Post

As doctors we have both had our fair share of patient success stories. A patient presents herself to our office or emergency room with a problem, we diagnose it, prescribe treatment, and the patient gets better. We can remember Lois who presented with vomiting, whom we diagnosed with gastroenteritis, treated and restored to health two weeks later. And Emmanuel who came to the emergency department with a cut on his forehead because he fell down the stairs. He was sutured up and the cut healed nicely. All clinicians have these stories. They are the reason why many of us went to medical school, to heal people, to make them better.

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