The United States public health policy: Managed by objectives

1988 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 167-185
Author(s):  
J. Michael McGinnis ◽  
James A. Harrell
PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. e0253381
Author(s):  
Ioannis Chalkiadakis ◽  
Hongxuan Yan ◽  
Gareth W. Peters ◽  
Pavel V. Shevchenko

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments globally had to impose severe contact restriction measures and social mobility limitations in order to limit the exposure of the population to COVID-19. These public health policy decisions were informed by statistical models for infection rates in national populations. In this work, we are interested in modelling the temporal evolution of national-level infection counts for the United Kingdom (UK—Wales, England, Scotland), Germany (GM), Italy (IT), Spain (SP), Japan (JP), Australia (AU) and the United States (US). We model the national-level infection counts for the period January 2020 to January 2021, thus covering both the pre- and post-vaccine roll-out periods, in order to better understand the most reliable model structure for the COVID-19 epidemic growth curve. We achieve this by exploring a variety of stochastic population growth models and comparing their calibration, with respect to in-sample fitting and out-of-sample forecasting, both with and without exposure adjustment, to the most widely used and reported growth model, the Gompertz population model, often referred to in the public health policy discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Model risk as we explore it in this work manifests in the inability to adequately capture the behaviour of the disease progression growth rate curve. Therefore, our concept of model risk is formed relative to the standard reference Gompertz model used by decision-makers, and then we can characterise model risk mathematically as having two components: the dispersion of the observation distribution, and the structure of the intensity function over time for cumulative counts of new infections daily (i.e. the force of infection) attributed directly to the COVID-19 pandemic. We also explore how to incorporate in these population models the effect that governmental interventions have had on the number of infected cases. This is achieved through the development of an exposure adjustment to the force of infection comprised of a purpose-built sentiment index, which we construct from various authoritative public health news reporting. The news reporting media we employed were the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, Reuters global blog, as well as national and international health authorities: the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the United States Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organisation. We find that exposure adjustments that incorporate sentiment are better able to calibrate to early stages of infection spread in all countries under study.


2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 464-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth H. Howze ◽  
M. Elaine Auld ◽  
Lynn D. Woodhouse ◽  
Jessica Gershick ◽  
William C. Livingood

The Galway Consensus Conference articulated key definitions, principles, values, and core domains of practice as the foundation for the diffusion of health promotion across the globe. The conference occurred in the context of an urgent need for large numbers of trained health workers in developing countries, which face multiple severe threats to the health of their people. In this article, the authors draw on the experience acquired by the health promotion profession in the United States to illustrate what might be done to build health promotion capacity in developing countries. They examine the profession's experience in the areas of accreditation and certification, research and publications, advocating for the profession, and advocating for public health policy. Finally, the authors direct a challenge to the profession in the United States to extend a hand to developing countries to assist them in expanding their capacity to prepare health promotion professionals and deliver health promotion services.


2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constance A. Nathanson

Dangers to life and health abound. Even among the subset known to medicine and science, however, there is no guarantee that any particular danger will rise to the level of a recognized public health problem or elicit a response from the makers of public policy. The path from knowledge to policy is not straightforward; scientific consensus does not lead automatically to policy consensus. Judgments of what dangers should be most feared, how to explain them, what to do about them, and even whether they are public health problems at all are the outcome of social processes. A couple of examples may help to clarify these points.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A Anong ◽  
Jude N. Okoyeh

Globally, more than two million people, about 53,000 in Africa have died from COVID-19 infection. By any metric, Africa has so far fared better than most parts of the world including, some of the most developed and affluent nations like the United States of America in the fight to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis of published COVID-19 data shows that Africa, with a population four times greater than that of the United States recorded forty times less number of positive cases and at least thirty fold decrease in the number of COVID-19 deaths. The data also demonstrates that the population case positivity and fatality rates in Europe are respectively ~24 and ~23 folds greater than those of Africa. The vast disparity in the metrics between advanced nations in Europe and the United States, with substantial healthcare budgets and the developing nations of Africa is worth examining.  In this article, we offer some perspectives to explain Africa’s low case positivity and death rates from COVID-19 infections. While many factors contribute to the world’s collective vulnerability to the pandemic, structural, demographic and sound public health policy together are essential in fighting off the disease.


Author(s):  
Monika Mitra ◽  
Linda Long-Bellil ◽  
Robyn Powell

This chapter draws on medical, social, and legal perspectives to identify and highlight ethical issues pertaining to the treatment, representation, and inclusion of persons with disabilities in public health policy and practice. A brief history of disability in the United States is provided as a context for examining the key ethical issues related to public health policy and practice. Conceptual frameworks and approaches to disability are then described and applied. The chapter then discusses the imperativeness of expanding access to public health programs by persons with disabilities, the need to address implicit and structural biases, and the importance of including persons with disabilities in public health decision-making.


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