Back in the early 1900s, if you felt a bit sluggish you could reach for a beverage enhanced with radioactive elements to really add some pep to your step. It wouldn’t be a healthy choice, though.
A public health programme respected locally, lauded globally, and based on the best science for helping homeless crack users, is at risk of falling victim to Brazil’s partisan politics.
Precision public health has the potential to transform the global health sphere by ensuring that the right interventions are brought to the right people in the right places.
Time spent outdoors makes us happier and healthier – and ‘synthetic nature’ may be able to replicate some of the effect.
Face masks like these, modeled by students from the Peltier Aerosol Lab, vary widely in effectiveness against fine particle pollution.
Richard E. Peltier
Inexpensive cloth face masks, worn by many people in heavily polluted countries, offer only partial protection. Instead governments should warn people to avoid exposure and work to clear the air.
A woman looks at a CDC health advisory sign about Zika at Miami International Airport
Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Politics, not epidemiology or medicine, drives government responses to disease. Politicians are the ultimate decision-makers in public health, and they must respond to political forces.
Health studies in Pennsylvania show links between some health problems and local fracking activity.
Les Stone/Reuters
Recent reports claiming we need to do five times more exercise than we previously thought are incorrect. Current physical activity guidelines are enough to achieve health benefits.
Public health experts enlist the molecular biology tools that create genetically modified organisms – as well as the GMOs themselves – in the fight against emerging infectious diseases.
Piccadilly Circus in smog, 1952.
Unknown photographer/Wikipedia
Data from London’s Great Smog of 1952 show that air pollution exposure in early life leads to striking increases in asthma rates. Millions in the developing world face similar risks today.
Jefferson County Sheriff Cadet Andrew Sevitts directs traffic as police stop drivers to see if they are under the influence of drugs or alcohol at a mobile Driving Under the Influence (DUI) checkpoint in Golden, Colorado in 2008.
Rick Wilking/Reuters
Millions of people need to be confident that suitable public toilets will be available when they leave their homes. A shortage of such facilities is a serious problem for an ageing population.
First minister Nicola Sturgeon and deputy John Swinney.
Andrew Milligan/PA
The government’s focus on treating chronic disease neglects the importance of obesity and the benefits of preventive health measures tailored to gender and socioeconomic circumstances.
After one reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant caught fire and exploded in 1986, the whole site was encased in a concrete sarcophagus.
Vladimir Repik/Reuters
The meltdown at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 exposed 572 million people to radiation. No other nuclear accident holds a candle to that level of public health impact.
Parks are found in most neighbourhoods, generally free to use and are enjoyed by diverse groups. Although most visitors don’t use parks for physical activity, modest improvements can change that.
Indigenous people have poorer health outcomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts.
Clive Hyde/Northern Territory Government
Indigenous people in Australia and New Zealand, despite the distance separating them and varying histories, have one disturbing issue in common: poor health.
There are eight skills that future professionals should develop to work for the good of society.
Shutterstock