MPH502-Introduction to Public Health (Module 3 CBT) Essay

MPH502-Introduction to Public Health (Module 3 CBT) - Essay Example Right from the early days of industrial revolution, substantial portions of rural population together with migrants coming in search of work from other countries flocked to cities and towns that resulted in overcrowding, slum conditions and squalor with the associated problems of garbage, sewage, pollution and unclean drinking water that had negative impact on public health. Citizens quite rightly veered round to the opinion that control of diseases and maintenance of public health should fall in the public domain of governmental responsibility and there should be relevant laws and regulations that would ensure each citizen gets the chance to lead a healthy life with government being responsible to provide all the necessary amenities and maintain decent standards of public health. Governments of both industrialized and developing countries have since then passed numerous legislations in this regard and public health is quite rightly now firmly entrenched in the domain of public autho rity and public administration. Neither the governments nor the citizens deny that the primary responsibility of public health rests with the government of the country. Public health professionals quite obviously desire that there should be progressively larger allocation of funds towards prevention of diseases rather than fighting them when they threaten to go out of hand and become a matter of serious concern. Prevention, as the saying goes, is always better than cure. But in the political climate prevailing in late and middle 1990s it was becoming increasingly difficult for public health professionals to emphasize the importance of prevention as some of the law makers were of the opinion that the threat to public health was made to look more sinister than it actually was. Though there might be some instances of such overdrive, one agrees wholeheartedly with the author’s concern about prevention of a disease before it snowballs into a public health crisis. (Gostin L. O.,