PUBLIC HEALTH
Farihah Choudhury ANutr Farihah is a Public Health Nutritionist within Hampshire County Council. She is particularly interested in food policy, noncommunicable diseases as a result of changing food environments, sustainable diets and food culture, and anthropology. www. easypeasysustainability nutrition.co.uk easypeasy sustainability farihahchdhry
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PUBLIC HEALTH STRATEGIES: DO THEY WORK? In the UK, we have had 30 years of public health strategies on obesity, the latest being the Government’s ‘Better Health’ campaign. This article hones in on the last 30 years of public health strategies targeting obesity, in response to some newly published research from the Centre for Diet and Activity Research and MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge.3 Public health strategies can take many forms. Usually, they are an ongoing response to long-term population health issues, or a reactive response to emerging issues. From a historical perspective, public health campaigns tell an illuminating tale. WHEN DO WE NEED PUBLIC HEALTH STRATEGIES?
As we have witnessed with the COVID-19 pandemic, public health campaigns as part of a strategy response, traverse all of the undulating motions, from beginning to end (which may be decades later). The motions of population panic, rapid response scientific and healthcare innovation, misinformation, mixed messaging, interventions with various degrees of success, dissenters and the residual ebb and flow of the responsible agent as part of ‘business-as-usual’ society – whether that is tobacco or an airborne virus – are etched into public health history for the rest of time. Devastating and global reaching public health disruptors requiring quick and reactive responses tend to take the form of viruses, causing some scale of epidemic. Public health strategies to contain viral agents usually take the same trajectory, ending in containment and then eventual vaccination, with a view to achieving complete eradication
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when enough of the population are vaccinated, imbuing herd immunity and hence minimising transmission to almost zero. In August 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Africa declared they were polio-free after over a century in response.1 Communicable diseases understandably take the spotlight when talking about public health strategies, due to how they are transmitted. Other major public health problems we have experienced of the non-communicable type are tobacco smoking, alcohol consumption and high prevalence of obesity. The UK Government has a list on its website of all the issues they currently consider as requiring an ongoing public health response.2 Over the last 50 or so years (depending on the part of the world in question), we have seen a steady rise in prevalence of obesity as a consequence of a rapidly changing global food environment. An issue is considered a public health problem when it is causing significant morbidity or mortality in the population, and consequently puts a strain on health services, both operationally and fiscally. By pure happy coincidence for this feature, very recently, academics Dolly Theis and Martin White of the Centre for Diet and Activity Research and MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of
