Health Definition, History and Basics Part - 2

History of Public Health:

Public health refers to both the health of a population via popular health indicators (quantitative and qualitative, including access to care), and all capable of collective healing, promote health and improve living conditions. It is intertwined with religious beliefs and animist, and the role of healer (shaman, sorcerers, etc..) that use both the local pharmacopoeia, touch and practices of magic, divination, or psychology.

In Europe, the organization of care remained until the nineteenth century overwhelmingly dependent on private initiatives and charities (The role of religious institutions has long been dominant, assisting maladies being regarded as a work of charity).

From the eighteenth century, the disease gradually ceases to be regarded as inevitable and the body becomes a concern. The first movement consists of the elites, and then gradually expanding to wider society. Health becomes a law that states must guarantee.

The development of industrialization is a second factor that tends to explain the development of public health: one for simple criteria of productivity of workers (occupational medicine), the other for fear of riots and under the pressure from trade unions.

Finally the First and Second World War contribute to the development of medical care mass and the establishment of social policies: the birth of the concept of the welfare state. After the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, public health takes a global dimension with the WHO. The epidemiology expands to better monitor zoonotic diseases transmitted to humans, especially through collaboration with FAO and the OIE under the auspices of the UN. Europe tends to become more important in the field of health.

The concept of public health:

The concept of public health includes several fields:

• health including occupational medicine and sometimes approaches epidemiological

• Management prevention campaigns, which should influence other sectors of society to promote health (economy, schools, traffic, housing, environment, lifestyle, etc.) vaccination ...

• organizing networks of care: first aid, hospitals, physicians, emergency medicine ...

• the initial and continuing training of medical and paramedical

• social security and health insurance (social security in France)

• medical and pharmacological research

Policies promoting Health:

Health promotion as defined by WHO is the process that gives people the means to ensure greater control over their own health, and improve it. This is a defining the concept "health" as the extent to which a group or individual can of achieving its ambitions and meet its needs and, second, with the change or adapt to it.

Health crisis:

The health crises are pandemics important, affecting among a dozen people (case of high-profile crises that affect developed countries, as some food crises) and millions of people. They may have economic, social and political areas.

WHO has also been created for a pandemic such as that produced by the Spanish flu is not repeated with the same effects (30 to 100 million deaths according to sources).

Health, political, legal and economic:

The sums at stake in the health sector are considerable, both for costs related diseases, pollution and absenteeism, as the market for care and medication (In 2002, the global drug was valued at 430.3 billion dollars, against 220 billion in 1992).

The pharmaceutical market grew from 203 billion euros. Medical and consumption growing faster than GDP in developed countries.

Health crises such as a pandemic may have economic, social and political areas. WHO has also been created for a pandemic such as that produced by the Spanish flu is not repeated with the same effects (30 to 100 million deaths according to sources).

Health is taken into account by the law, including in terms of working conditions.

The European Union has produced numerous directives, regulations or decisions to protect the health of consumers or animals consumed.