Good Public Health Is Invisible
It’s only when things go wrong that you notice it. It looks like people will really notice public health in the United States quite soon.
One of the most well-known sayings in the world of epidemiology is “when public health works, it’s invisible.”. I’ve seen this or some version of it attributed to many people over the years, and it’s one of the most obvious facts about how public health works. When things go well, people live their lives oblivious to all of the activity that’s going on around them to keep them healthy.
Vaccines are the most obvious example of how this works. When you vaccinate children against diseases that they’d otherwise suffer from, you remove the main thing that people notice. Some people take a moment to think about all the infections that their parents used to get as children, but most of the time they barely notice the massive reductions in infectious disease that we’ve achieved over the last century or so.
You can see the issue. People in the 60s noticed that their children occasionally died of SSPE, a fatal issue that is sometimes caused by measles. My…
