Aspirations and Strategies for Public Health

Public health is responsible for extraordinary achievements over the past century, such as remarkable gains in life expectancy and substantial decreases in infectious disease mortality, and could make similar critical contributions to health in this century. Public health should be ascendant, but ample evidence suggests that it is on the defensive today, underappreciated, and underfunded. Government actions to improve the health of populations are widely suspect, as illustrated by the controversies involving efforts to curb soda container sizes in New York City, state and federal efforts to limit reproductive health rights, and global efforts to address climate change.