The
nature of public health nutrition |
| What is our mission now? |
Public health professionals are engaged in politics,
there’s no doubt about that. This doesn’t mean
‘politics’ in the sense the word is used in
English-speaking countries, meaning specific
political parties, ideologies or tendencies. It
means public policies, involving governments, civil
society and professional organisations, industry,
and other players. These may be combined into
general programmes, but are independent from
political party platforms.
So one of the key questions for us as a profession
to address is: what is our mission now? Or to be
more precise, what should our main priorities be,
now and in the foreseeable future?
Seeing the big picture
In his statement of support for our 2012
Congress to be held in Rio, Paulo Buss, President of
the World Federation of Public Health Associations (WFPHA),
makes his view clear. The context for the work of
public health professionals, he says, now includes
climate change, social, economic and other
inequalities, and the degradation and disappearance
of natural resources.
Surely, what Dr Buss says is correct. He refers to
the big picture of which the current crisis of food
security and supply is one part. These are the
issues that above all we have to address, in order
to protect the quality of life most of all of
impoverished populations. Indeed, the picture we
need to see is even bigger. To quote from the
preamble of the Istanbul Declaration on the nature
and purpose of public health, agreed at the world
congress of the WFPHA last May, and to be found at
www.wfpha.org:
‘ This is a time of intense disturbance. We are now
living in a new world, of unique challenge and also
unique opportunity for those committed to public
health and for everybody. The challenges we now face
are as great as those that faced public health
pioneers of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
‘ Committed and sustained leadership is needed,
including from young people. Now is the time for all
those who affect the lives of others, working in
government, industry, and in civil society, and as
health care workers, academics, community and
faith-based leaders, and citizens, to affirm the
fundamental and elemental importance of public
goods, including public health, and to assert and
practice the basic human values of solidarity,
sustainability, morality, justice, equity, fairness
and tolerance’.
This also surely is right. It resolves the current
debate about whether public health nutritionists
should be mainly concerned with deficiency diseases
or with chronic diseases. Given a focus on disease,
the answer is both. But our over-riding
responsibility is more fundamental. It is to do with
well-being. It is also to do with the protection of
the human species and also of the living and
physical world and the biosphere.
Public health nutritionists cannot take on all this
task. But we are involved, and need to engage. The
task in our own field is itself immense. It is
generally agreed in the USA (1), the UK (2) and
elsewhere, that food, water and energy shortages
will become general and severe in the first half of
this century. This means that civilisation in the
form that more privileged people now enjoy, is
itself under threat worldwide. (3-5). There is much
to face, and much to do.
The editors
References
- Beddington J. Speech at SDUK 09.
Obtainable at:
www.govnet.co.uk/news/govnet/professor-sir-john-beddingtons-speech-at-sduk-09
- Fedoroff N as reported in Times Online,
23 March 2009. Obtainable at:
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5962238.ece
- Brown L, 2009. Could food shortages
bring down civilization? The biggest threat
to global stability is the potential for
food crises in poor countries to cause
government collapse. Scientific American.
Obtainable at
www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=civilization-food-shortages
- Diamond J, 2005.
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or
survive. London: Penguin Books.
- Flannery T, 2006.
The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the
Climate and
What it Means for Life on Earth.
Melbourne: Text Publishing.
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