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The world is currently in the midst of unprecedented challenges—from the impacts of climate change and the humanitarian crisis of forced migration, to the rise of nationalism and epidemic growth of deaths of despair. These challenges require new approaches catalyzing communities, cities, and countries around the globe to embrace a well-being agenda to assess progress and guide solutions. Thus, this book provides ideas and guidance on advancing well-being locally, nationally, and internationally. It illuminates how diverse communities and cultures can work together to strengthen these efforts. Ultimately, the well-being framework offers an equity focus; a more human centered view of how things are going; holistic approaches; and interconnectedness. The goal here is to advance global dialogue and action on the well-being construct, and to inform the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) work with others to create a Culture of Health in the United States.

This book will orient public health scholars and practitioners, as well as professionals from related fields such as the social sciences and design professions, to the tools and skills needed for effective urban health research, including foundational concepts, data sources, strategies for generating evidence, and engagement and dissemination strategies to inform action for urban health. The book brings together what the researchers are learning through ongoing research experience and their efforts to inform action. Chapters also feature brief contributions from other urban health experts and practitioners. The book highlights throughout the public health importance of urban environments and the critical need for diverse interdisciplinary teams and intersectoral collaboration to develop and evaluate approaches to improve health in urban settings. Urban health professionals are often charged with working in ways that take a systems perspective and challenge conventional silos, while also engaging in more traditional public health actions and research strategies. The text is infused with themes emphasizing the importance of place for health, the potential to link evidence with action, and the critical need to attend to health inequities within urban environments. By providing a primer on the range of activities and capacities useful to urban health researchers, the book supports reader in their own professional development and team building by covering a range of relevant skills and voices. The primary audience includes trainees at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels who are interested in creating actionable evidence and in taking evidence-informed action to improve health within urban settings.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Japan developed into a thriving economy, and the Japanese remain one of the healthiest populations in the world to this day. However, in the past 25 years, low growth, mounting debt, and rapid ageing have complicated this image, and global interest in the longevity and social cohesion of the Japanese populace is now greater than ever. Health in Japan brings together the perspectives and research of Japan's leading social epidemiologists in English for the first time, creating an informative text which is accessible to both Japanese and international readers. With chapters on key topics such as Chronic Disease, Disasters and Health, and Mental Health and Wellbeing, the textbook offers a comprehensive examination of the major health issues facing the country. The book focuses predominantly on the primary, upstream causes of health and disease, as well as evidence on the wider determinants of wellbeing and illness.

“Viruses, Plagues, & History” focuses on the effects of viral diseases on human history. Written by an eminent internationally respected virologist, it couples the fabric of history with major concepts developed in virology, immunology, vaccination, and accounts by people who first had, saw and acted at the times these events occurred. Much of the preventive and therapeutic progress (vaccines, antiviral drugs) has been made in the last 60 years. Many of those who played commanding roles in the fight to understand, control and eradicate viruses and viral diseases are (were) personally known to the author and several episodes described in this book reflect their input. The book records the amazing accomplishments that led to the control of lethal and disabling viral diseases caused by Smallpox, Yellow Fever, Measles, Polio, Hepatitis A, B and C, and HIV. These six success stories are contrasted with viral infections currently out of control—COVID-19, Ebola virus, Lassa Fever virus, Hantavirus, West Nile virus, and Zika. Influenza, under reasonable containment at present, but with the potential to revert to a world-wide pandemic similar to 1918–1919 where over 50 million people were killed. The new platforms to develop inhibitory and prophylactic vaccines to limit these and other viral diseases is contrasted to the anti-vaccine movement and the false prophets of autism.

Healthcare public health is concerned with the application of population sciences to the design, organization, and delivery of healthcare services, with the ultimate aim of improving population health. This book provides a modern introduction to the methods and subject matter of healthcare public health, bringing together coverage of all the key areas in a single volume. Topics include healthcare needs’ assessment; access to healthcare; knowledge management; ethical issues; involvement of patients and the public; population screening; health promotion and disease prevention; new service models; programme budgeting and preparation of a business case; evaluation and outcomes; patient safety, and implementation and improvement sciences; healthcare in remote and resource-poor regions; and disasters and emergencies. Drawing on international perspectives, this volume will be relevant wherever healthcare is delivered. It will enable students, researchers, academics, practitioners, and policy makers to contribute to the goals of designing and delivering health services that improve population health, reduce inequalities, and meet the needs of individuals and communities.

Currently, population health science is an integral part of academic curricula around the world. For over a century, the principles of the reductionist paradigm have guided population health curricula, training, research, and action. Researchers continue to draw upon these principles when theorizing, conceptualizing, designing studies, analyzing, and devising interventions to tackle complex population health problems. However, unresolved impasses in delineating and managing pressing population health challenges have catalyzed calls for the integration of complex systems science–grounded theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches into population health science. Mounting evidence denotes that a complex systems paradigm can bring about dramatic, multipronged changes for education and training and lead to innovative research, interventions, and policies. Despite the large and untapped promise of complex systems, the haphazard knowledge base from which academics, researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners can draw has slowed their integration into the population health sciences. This volume fulfills this growing need by providing the knowledge base necessary to introduce a holistic complex systems paradigm in population health science. As such, it is the first comprehensive book in population health science that meaningfully integrates complex systems theory, methodology, modeling, computational simulation, and real-world applications, while incorporating current population health theoretical, methodological, and analytical perspectives. It is intended as a programmatic primer across a broad spectrum of population health stakeholders—from university professors and graduate students to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. This book also aims to provoke long-overdue discourse on the need for updated new curricula in the population health sciences.

As a country, the United States overinvests in medical care, often at the expense of the social, economic, and cultural forces that produce health. Indeed, the rise of medicine as a cornerstone of American life and culture has coincided with a social and political devaluation of factors demonstrated to mean more to one’s vitality than anything else—influences like where one lives, works, and plays; livable wages that create opportunity for healthy living; and gender and racial equity. As such, this book moves the conversation around American health toward matters of class, money, and culture. It highlights how the structural components of everyday life ultimately determine who gets to be healthy in today’s America. In doing so, it makes a case for reframing the political discourse on public health in less myopic, more effectual terms.

This book concerns the importance of achieving health equity throughout the United States. Its publication is timely, given the major challenges in American health care in recent years. These include reductions in health care coverage, the loss of funding to tackle social determinants of health, and the growing risks associated with climate change. The abundant data that document health inequities in housing, education, incarceration, income, opportunity, and so much else in the United States reveal the extent of the health-based challenges the nation faces as a whole. With these issues in mind, this book tackles a variety of topics centered on a “Culture of Health,” and includes contributions from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF) Sharing Knowledge to Build a Culture of Health conferences. The first part of this volume concerns the assets intrinsic to cultural identity and the contribution to the nation's well-being that this diversity brings. Next, the book calls attention to the places where people spend much of their time and shows how each setting has the power to generate health, or to undermine it. Finally, this book closes with a section on a broad range of interconnected topics that have drawn considerable attention from many fields and brought new perspectives to the table.

Essentials for Health Protection: Four Key Components is an introductory to intermediate level textbook and reference book for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as healthcare professionals, non-health actors, and policymakers who are interested in obtaining an overview of an integrated and comprehensive public health approach to health protection. Health protection is one of the three major core theoretical domains of public health, which aims to prevent and manage communicable disease outbreaks and environmental health risks and related diseases. Effective health protection measures may enhance individual, community, and institutional resilience in coping with extreme events. In addition to introducing the four areas covering both health and environmental protection, namely, climate change adaptation and mitigation, emergency preparedness, communicable disease control, and environmental health, this book will also explore a number of new health protection frontiers, such as key discussions in Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management (H-EDRM), planetary health, and sustainability. The whole health protection spectrum from risk mitigation, prevention interventions, and emergency response are discussed in a comprehensive, contextual, multidisciplinary, and cross-national way. Various text boxes and case examples are included throughout the book to illustrate what the current status of health protection is globally and impart the latest controversies and dynamics that might change the landscape and reality of health protection practices and development.

This book explores the lives and work of scientists who unraveled the mysteries of meningitis and describes the steps (and sometimes missteps) they used to accomplish their splendid achievements. Although symptoms of meningitis were recorded as early as the time of Hippocrates, its origin remained obscure. Then, in 1892, one of the bacteria that cause meningitis in children, Haemophilus influenzae, was discovered when Richard Pfeiffer saw it in material coughed up by a patient with influenza. Pfeiffer mistakenly thought the bacteria caused influenza, and it has carried that unfortunate, erroneous name since that time. Discovery, however, marched forward, and Quincke discovered how to obtain spinal fluid by inserting a needle between two bones in the patient’s back. Pittman discovered the sugar overcoat that protects H. influenzae from being eaten by white blood cells. Flexner managed epidemics of meningitis with serum from a horse. Griffith unknowingly stumbled on DNA, the master of all life. Weech gave the first antibiotic used in America to a little girl with meningitis. Alexander learned why antibiotics sometimes fail in such patients. Smith won the Nobel Prize for showing how DNA invades bacteria, the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. And four scientists, in two teams, vied to be the first to create the best vaccine to prevent meningitis in infants.