We’ve Been Here Before…..
Last week’s post by Lesley Henderson on the contemporary anti-vaccination movement’s use of social media, Charlie Davison takes a look at the history of the battle between Public Health and the ‘Anti-Vaxxers’, and finds that things haven’t changed much in over...
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Chubby Boozers with Ageing Hearts
What will the person in the street make of recent public health scare tactics? As the politics of austerity continues to bite into NHS and other public budgets, Britain’s top health promotion brains have decided that precious future health resources...
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Public Health and the (New) Media
On industry, audiences and health messages Public health campaigners are increasingly focussing on models of media engagement due to the considerable and growing amount of evidence that media campaigns can change population health behaviours. New forms of media (that is...
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Incentivizing vulnerability: Regulating migration
Around 9,000 young people who arrived as unaccompanied children and claimed asylum have been denied a residence permit in Sweden since 2015. With a peak of new arrivals in 2015, the waiting time for decisions increased dramatically from a matter of...
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Big Drinkers to get a Big Nudge
Public Health England is putting all its efforts into alcohol unit pricing – but is it really the right thing to do? Last week, the Parliamentary Health Select Committee was listening to the views of Public Health experts on the...
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Making a virtue of variation? The fragmentation of the English NHS
Geographic reform of the NHS is not new: region, district, area, and locality are all familiar terms in NHS history, and notions of “place” as an organising principle retain an intrinsic appeal for policy-makers. Recently, the English NHS has now...
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VIDEO: Public Health in the Calais Refugee Camp
Public Health in the Calais Refugee Camp: Environment, Health and Exclusion If you missed this year’s ‘Cost of Living’ Symposium it is now available to watch in the above video. Surindar Dhesi, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University...
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The Gradual Rehabilitation of Salt
The Public Health campaign against salt seems to be losing ground – for some sociologically interesting reasons. It’s become one of those facts that everyone knows – too much salt is bad for you, right? But a complete lack of...
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Placebo, participation and surgery
A therapeutic effect that cannot be attributed to an active ingredient of medication is termed ‘placebo’. The ‘placebo effect’ is far from a neutral description of the effect of ‘inert drugs’, being associated with the quackery and deception of sugar...
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Why we keep playing the Generation Blame Game … and why we need to stop
Successive generations’ healthy disregard of the previous generation’s tastes, habits and customs is a necessary ingredient of human progress. But there is something about the current carving up of the population into ever smaller generational slices of entitlement and opprobrium...
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Governing in the heat
As I write it’s baking hot, and seems to have been for days. The usual risks apply to writing about it though. By the time this is published the thunder storms we have been promised may have brought cooler wetter...
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The Colonisation of Pondering and Pottering