A book review by Matteo Pinna Pintor of ‘A History of Public Health‘ by George Rosen. Ebola and Zika outbreaks in the tropics make the reissue of this classic of medical history a timely event. Written in the late 1950s by a pioneer of American health education, the volume is a retrospective tour de force which tracks the evolution of public health from classical antiquity to the welfare state, focusing largely on
A book review by Matteo Pinna Pintor on ‘Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao’s Campaign to Deworm China‘ by Miriam Gross. This book’s title refers to a poem written by Mao Zedong in 1958. The God of Plague is schistosomiasis, a tropical disease which, in 2013, affected almost 300 million people around the world. Schistosome worms alternate parasitism of humans and freshwater snails, with aquatic larval stages in-between. Untreated heavy infections cause
The term “Sustainable Diets” (SD) entered the public health lexicon in 1987, but its translation into reality is proving slow. In its most pared-down formulation, SD means good nutrition with low carbon emissions. In more complex forms, it means eating within environmental limits while eating well for health and in a manner appropriate to economic, social and cultural circumstances. Whichever version of SD is adopted, policy-makers have been surprisingly reluctant