What are the lessons from history of public health development in the United States?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

• First, organized public health activities began in local, seaport villages and focused on problems directly related to those communities; the focus later shifted to state and national activities and lost some of the local connection and importance; funding for these activities shifted to state and federal sources, making individual communities less involved with the funding.
• The early efforts in organized public health focused on infectious diseases because they were the most immediate threats to the public’s health; when the major health problems shifted toward chronic disease, organized public health was slow to shift its emphasis to the different disease paradigm and was much less effective in meeting the challenge of preventing chronic illness and its impacts.
• Finally, many of the early public health programs used a categorical, disease-specific approach to organize public health activities; as the challenges of health promotion and disease prevention shifted to chronic illness, public health effectiveness faltered because of the lack of an appropriate program model of a broader and more general nature. Much organized public health activity today still remains in a categorical, disease-specific organization both for funding and for program operation.