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The Field of Public Health

Public health is concerned with the health of human populations. Theses can be small groups or entire societies. It discovers and promotes the systematic changes that lead to less disease, safer environments, longer lives, and fewer disparities between people around the world.

Public health focuses on prevention. It strives to promote health and prolong life through informing the choices of governments, organizations, communities and individuals. It develops and implements the policies and programs that provide people access to needed care and opportunities to make their families healthy and happy.

This 1920s photograph, taken in the southern United States, showed workers practicing “vector control” by digging a drainage ditch, in order to help disperse standing water that was acting as a popular breeding ground for a population of Anopheles mosquitoes, a well-known vector for the parasitic disease, malaria. (Source: CDC Public Health Image Library).

Learn More About Public Health

• What Is Public Health?
• The American Public Health Association
• The Association of Schools of Public Health
• World Health Organization
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In March 2008, UM SPH's newly organized Students Against Secondhand Smoke and their advisor Jen Martin (left) visited with Michigan state senators in Lansing, including Senator Liz Brater (D-Ann Arbor, center), to urge passage of legislation to make Michigan smokefree. (Photo by Suzanne Caterino)

In 2006, UM SPH students rebuilt a daycamp in Louisiana so children could have a summer nature experience based on nonviolence. Jawad Niazi got a creek moving again. “It’s basic environmental health science,” he said. “Standing water breeds mosquitos.” Read more about the Gulf Coast fieldwork.
(Photo by MB Lewis)