By Andrew Binet, Stanford Social Innovation Reveiw, Fall 2020
This year’s public health crises—the coronavirus pandemic and endemic police violence—have shone a harsh light on historical inequities in the United States, prompting calls for new ways to guarantee the health, safety, and well-being of all Americans.
Historically, attention to public health has waxed and waned as crises strike and then abate. The result has been a patchwork of inadequate public health infrastructure, the weaknesses of which are evident in the United States’ uneven response to COVID-19. Written just before the current crises, Bechara Choucair’s Precision Community Health: Four Innovations for Well-being offers one potential path forward for public health in an increasingly uncertain future.
The modern field of public health has undergone two revolutions and is currently in the throes of a third. Choucair, the former commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH), explains that the first revolution made dramatic reductions in communicable disease transmission through infrastructural improvements in the 19th century, such as sewers and housing in rapidly growing industrial cities. Beginning in the 20th century, the second revolution addressed chronic diseases—such as cancer, asthma, and diabetes—that are characteristic of advanced industrial society and are driven by a consumerist lifestyle and the industrial processes undergirding it.
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