15/11/2024
The greatest triumph of public health is also, paradoxically, its greatest challenge: When it works perfectly, it becomes invisible. We no longer see children in iron lungs, paralyzed by polio. We don't lose our siblings to diphtheria or watch our children struggle to breathe through whooping cough. The horrors that our grandparents considered routine have faded into history books, replaced by the luxury of forgetting why we needed these protections in the first place.
This invisibility comes at a cost. While medicine celebrates its heroes - the surgeon who saves a life, the oncologist who defeats cancer - public health's victories are measured in the disasters that never happened, the epidemics that never spread, the deaths that never occurred. We've become so accustomed to safe drinking water, clean air, and vaccine-preventable diseases being actually prevented that we've forgotten the massive infrastructure and constant vigilance required to maintain this safety.
Today's parents questioning the need for vaccines have, thankfully, never seen a child gasping with pertussis or watched measles sweep through a classroom. They haven't witnessed the summer panic of polio season, when swimming pools closed and parents kept children inside, desperate to avoid the paralyzing virus. This generational amnesia is, ironically, a testament to public health's effectiveness. We've done our job so well that the threats we protect against seem theoretical rather than real.
Threats to public health infrastructure mean that we risk returning to a past we've forgotten, where preventable tragedies were commonplace rather than rare.
Public health cannot survive on the memory of past victories. Its continued success requires active support, robust funding, and public trust. As we face new challenges - from emerging diseases to climate change - we must remember that public health's invisibility when it succeeds doesn't make it any less essential. In fact, it makes it more important than ever.
