Making Health Public

For many people, COVID may be the first time you’ve thought about public health beyond things like the existence of vaccines. You may never have known that some diseases have to be reported straightaway to health authorities and that someone calls you if you’ve tested positive. You may never have heard of an epidemiologist or thought that we do something with skin.

Since COVID, though, you’re likely hearing terms like “contact tracing,” “quarantine,” and “isolation” all over the place. You may have heard about PCR testing and serological surveys using antibody testing. It’s possible you’ve even become a bit of an armchair epidemiologist. It might be the first time you’ve heard these words, but they’re far from new to public health. Below I talk a little about some terms you may have heard related to public health and some of their history.

There was a time not so very long ago in human history when we believed that miasmas (bad air) caused illness. Doctors didn’t even wash their hands between seeing patients because how could gentlemen be responsible for spreading illness?

There were no microscopes, so no one could look and see bacteria doing battle with our own immune system. People could only know what they observed and what they observed was that the areas where disease was most prevalent were also very smelly from the dead and dying people.

We know now, of course, that the smell so common in areas where poor people lived wasn’t the cause of their illness, but another product of the things making them sick. Bodies and human waste (lots of poo) left in the streets, rotting food, animals and humans living in close proximity, sewage in the water. Germ Theory tells us that these things become the breeding grounds of virus, bacteria, fungi, and other tiny critters which make us sick. By eliminating those risks from our environment, we eliminate a lot of the pathways those germs take to making us ill.

Testing, Tracing, Containing: COVID Response Strategies are Anything but New

Happy Birthday, Epidemiology!