You Get More From Public Health Than You Put In

A world without public health is a dystopian nightmare.

I first came into contact with public health the minute I was born. The doctors and nurses who helped perform the caesarean section on my mother wore gloves and practiced infection control in accordance with the public health recommendations of the time. The benefits of hand washing were first described by Ignaz Semmelweis in 1846, and public health scientists confirmed his observations. After decades of more trial and error, public health recommendations made their way into medical practice around the world.

Since that first time, I’ve had numerous other encounters with public health. As an infant, I received my full set of vaccines. Others where I was born were not as lucky, and several of them did not survive the childhood diseases those vaccines prevented. Some others still live with the consequences of those diseases today.

I tested positive for tuberculosis when I entered college. The skin test results were sent to the local health department, and a public health nurse visited me weekly to make sure I was taking the medication for latent tuberculosis. Admittedly, it could have been a false positive from having the BCG vaccine, since the chest x-rays showed no signs of the disease. But it was better to take the…