The Hindu Business Line : ‘Create new ideas in educating public health’

Hyderabad, Aug. 12 Innovation and change is needed in the way public health is delivered, Mr Barry Bloom, Dean, Harvard School of Public Health, said at the inauguration of a seminar here on Tuesday.

“We need to change the unhealthy behaviour and create new ideas. Even if it means providing incentives for the people to change their behaviour,” he said at the seminar on ‘New directions for public health education in low and middle income countries’.

He said the simplest way of distinguishing public health and clinical medicine is that the focus of public health is to prevent disease and focus of clinical medicine is to try to make people who are already ill healthier.

Giving an overview on the research at the Harvard School of Public Health, Mr Bloom said, “One is the unfinished agenda of communicable diseases, the other looking at chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes and hearth diseases, then there is the unnecessary epidemics caused by the environmental threats, problem of disparities in health.”

The Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Dr Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, said public health is a subject that has not been getting importance in the general parley of the society, especially in developing countries.

“We have seen so much of morbidity and mortality just because preventable diseases are not being prevented. If this problem is tacked in a more sophisticated and focused manner, things will be a lot better for the society,” Dr Reedy said.

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