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You Cannot Give Up Public Health

University of the People

ENGL 0101: English Composition I

Professor Kelly Patrick

October 21, 2021

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Public health is an inalienable individual and collective responsibility of each citizen of

the world because it aims to promote and protect not only physical health but mental and social

wellness as well, it is key to the development of our society and has been the focal point to

enhance the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health is a call to action itself to

promote health, prevent disease, and prolong life. It is not a task only others must be in charge of

because it needs the accountability and compromise of all.

The main object of public health is to protect and promote physical, mental, and social

wellness tackling the principal causes of disease and disability at a community and global scale.

From AIDS to malaria, maternal death to child’s nutrition, heart disease to obesity, food safety to

environmental sanitation, disabilities from trauma to substance abuse, infectious diseases control

to antimicrobial resistance, vaccination to epidemics, and the list goes on. Public health uses

epidemiology, research, statistics, and many other knowledge areas to diagnose communities’

health status to further design, plan, apply, and monitor its policies to address public health

issues. Individuals’ biology and lifestyles, along with the way they interact with their

environment in space and time, and the health systems are the determinants of health in a

community. Therefore, public health measures are guided to prevent infectious and not infectious

diseases and disabilities and to improve and restore health through organized efforts among

governments, health systems, and people, which are the ones responsible for adhering to those

measures for the sake of a better-quality life.

As we are nothing without our health, focusing on public health as key to the

development of our society influences productivity and growth in every aspect of life. Hence, it

must not be the last task to think about, but the top priority on a person’s, community, and

government to-do list. Integrating it with the other equal priority for a society, which is
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education, results in a powerful tool to respond to any threat to health. What a person knows

about a situation or topic defines its actions towards it. Health education enables people to be

conscious of what to expect and more importantly, take action themselves. It makes them wash

their hands, exercise, eat balanced meals, stop smoking, get vaccinated, wash food before

cooking, wear the seatbelt, etc. while good-functioning health systems and governments make

the necessary decisions to provide and guarantee the sanitary conditions that promote health. As

Shen et al. (2021) explain, “policymakers must promote the development of public health

education and human resources. As a feature of the political environment, public opinion is

essential for policy-making” (para. 1). Consequently, those coordinated actions lead to

preventing disease and living a healthy life, while protecting us, our environment, and everyone

else and also contributing to global development.

Nonetheless, deficient health systems globally, especially those in developing countries,

have been struggling even more since the COVID-19 pandemic aroused to maintain public

health policies, particularly because those have been the basis to enhance the global response to

this sanitary emergency. In the words of Alhaji (2021), “the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed

the world's interconnectedness and interdependence and has exerted pressure on world leaders,

policy-makers, and public health authorities to make ethically challenging decisions on public

health containment measures” (para. 2). Essential measures as keeping a two-feet distance,

wearing a mask, washing hands, and getting vaccinated have been saving thousands of millions

of people from infection and death since SARS-CoV-2 emerged while some other valuable

millions have not been able to survive the disease, or at least got disabilities from it. Therefore, it

is not about individuality when something we do can potentially damage another’s people life,

because rights are not an exception for some. If all do their necessary part, then it would not be
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necessary to keep running back and forth within the same problem and, in this case, taking each

one’s responsibility to public health seriously is the only way out of the COVID-19 crisis, as

with many other health issues.

There are several public health problems liable for millions of annual deaths and

disabilities, which directly impact a society’s growth and development. Understanding that

acting in favor of public health is a non-negotiable duty of everyone is the first step to improving

our health to a longer and better life. Changing habits, adhering to public policies, and educating

in health allows us to actively participate in public health efforts directed to promote and protect

our physical, mental and social welfare, and the COVID-19 pandemic has been the best example

for this claim. Decision-making in public health must be evidence-based from rigorous research

to guarantee their benefits stand out more than the burden these may represent, and the global

evidence has demonstrated that rigorous and adequately implemented social policies have

slowed the COVID-19 transmission (Enria et al., 2021). Taking action in public health must be

far from selfishness and go hand-in-hand with consciousness and compromise with ourselves and

the world surrounding us.

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References

Alhaji, A. (2021). Public health ethics and the COVID-19 pandemic. Annals of African

Medicine, 20 (3). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A676468881/HRCA?

u=lirn17237&sid=bookmark-HRCA&xid=027a34d9

Enria, D., Feng, Z., Fretheim, A., Ihekweazu, C., Ottersen, T. & Schuchat, A. (2021).

Strengthening the evidence base for decisions on public health and social measures.

Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 99 (9).

http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.21.287054

Shen, X., Li, J., Dong, T., Cao, H., Feng, J., Lei, Z., Wang, Z., Han, X., Ly, C. & Gan, Y. (2021).

Public Opinion and Expectations: Development of Public Health Education in China

After COVID-19 Pandemic. Frontiers in Public Health.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.702146