Public Health Practice: Transcending the Known

Transcending the known in public health practice: the inequality paradox: the population approach and vulnerable populations.

Using the concept of vulnerable populations, we examine how disparities in health may be exacerbated by population-approach interventions. We show, from an etiologic perspective, how life-course epidemiology, the concentration of risk factors, and the concept of fundamental causes of diseases may explain the differential capacity, throughout the risk-exposure distribution, to transform resource...

Gates's grandest challenge: transcending technology as public health ideology.

Transcending the theory-practice problem of technology

Design activities are fundamental to technological progress. Current design research holds tight to positivism, abandoned and critically opposed to by philosophers, mostly those outside the U.S. Maintaining the positivist view when conducting research leads to significant deficiencies in the quality of research, and to problems in transferring research results to practice. In spite of significa...

Terrorism and public health: the little known equation.

Sitting in our offices early in the morning of September 11, 2001, we, like many across the world, watched with incredulity the twin terrorist strikes on the World Trade Centre. Riveted to the television screen, we witnessed the beginnings of a nightmare whose images will likely remain with us for a long time. September 11, and the events that followed, changed our assumptions of world terroris...

Public health ethics: informing better public health practice.

Public health ethics has emerged and grown as an independent discipline over the last decade. It involves using ethical theory and empirical analyses to determine and justify the right thing to do in public health. In this paper, we distinguish public health ethics from clinical ethics, research ethics, public health law and politics. We then discuss issues in public health ethics including: ho...