Dean Notes Public Health Touchstones
With a new millennium underway, Dean Barry Bloom has reviewed some of the more influential events in the history of public health. Here are some notable touchstones in honor of National Public Health Week, April 3 to 9:
1. The discovery that germs cause disease/Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur. Late 1870s.
2. Vaccines against childhood diseases/Edward Jenner/smallpox, paper published 1798. Vaccines have saved more lives than any other medical measure.
3. The discovery of penicillin, the first antibiotic cure/Alexander Fleming, 1928.
4. The birth of epidemiology/ John Snow and the Broad Street water pump. In 1854, Snow discovered the mode of transmission of cholera in a London neighborhood and launched epidemiology as a medical science.
5. The randomized clinical trial, the gold standard of research design. This kind of trial is the way we really know whether medical interventions work. British statistician Austin Bradford Hill helped establish it as a model when he directed the first randomized clinical trial to test whether streptomycin would cure tuberculosis in 1948.
6. Prospective cohort studies/ The Nurses' Health Study. Helped researchers find the risks for and causes of disease in healthy people and the practices that predispose to or protect against diseases.
7. Meta-analysis. Enabled researchers to combine small studies and data without statistical power to make valid observations of the health of a group.
8. The discovery of the association between smoking and a range of chronic diseases.
9. Nutritional understanding, including the role of vitamin C and anti-oxidants in the body and the dietary contributions to cancer and birth defects. The "deficiency" theory of disease was first enunciated by Casimir Funk and Frederick Hopkins in 1912, but this field reaches back to James Lind in 1753 with his paper on scurvy.
10. The Pill - Contraception. Contributing to better health and longer
lives for women and their children.
