Public health impacts every person on the planet. Every scientific finding, awareness campaign, and new policy has the potential to change lives. It’s an exciting, challenging, and rewarding field that brings together people from many backgrounds, disciplines, and perspectives to discover the root causes of our most pressing challenges and create innovative solutions that improve everyone’s lives.
The field of Public health has a wide range of functions, from disease prevention to community empowerment. The overarching focus is to reduce the burden of illness and close disparities in health across groups of people, at the local, regional, national, and global levels. This contrasts with clinical medicine, which is focused on diagnosing and treating illness in individual patients.
A core tenet of public health is that prevention is the most efficient and effective strategy for improving human health. This approach reduces the strain on healthcare systems and improves overall quality of life. While this may seem obvious, it is often overlooked. The vast majority of medical expenditures go toward treatments, rather than prevention.
Traditionally, most federal responsibilities and oversight related to public health were handled by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with its agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and National Institutes of Health (NIH). However, since 1998 when the Public Health Service Act was passed, the U.S. has had a patchwork system of governance that includes local governments and the 574 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages with powers of self-government, which often have separate public health structures.
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