A public health wish list

Ensuring clean drinking water, boosting cancer screening, providing incentives aimed at healthy eating, and addressing socioeconomic factors that affect health such as housing and insurance are some of the measures that should be emphasized to improve public health, according to leading experts.

A September 4, 2018 New York Times article co-authored by Austin Frakt, adjunct associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, featured comments on what should be done in public health from officials who run public health departments, academics, and leaders of funding organizations.

Among those quoted was Mary Bassett, the former New York City health commissioner who recently became the director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and FXB Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights. Bassett noted that it’s imperative to address disparities across race and class.

“The patterns of disease and death track along this nation’s deep divides of race and income,” she said, adding that America needs to divest in prisons and “put that funding toward new systems of justice, better housing or universal child care.”

Read the New York Times article: What the Experts Want Us to Know About Public Health