Introduction Public health campaigns such as the plague in San Francisco and Change 4 Life in the UK were implemented based on different perspectives and strategies derived from various studies over the years. In this article, the history of public health, different perspectives and strategies of public health, their pros and cons, and the possibilities of future public health are discussed. Historical Perspective of Public Health in Relation to the Pictures Provided
Currently, it seems public health focuses on prevention and health promotion. However, it was different in the past. At the beginning, it was about improving living conditions such as hygiene, adequate water supply, managing food wastes, violence control, and so on.1 With the improvement in technology and science, the focus changed to the biomedical perspective, and vaccines were
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This was the time when the intervention in the photo 1 was implemented in the early 1900s. From the photo, it is clear that the public health authorities focused on the biomedical perspective. They have clearly stated how the disease was transmitted and how to stop the transmission.
In the late 20th century, different perspectives of public health were applied on different continents. Latin America shifted towards socio-medical and socio-environmental models by focusing on social medicine education at medical schools whereas North America moved towards the biomedical model with the focus on changing individual behaviours.3 With the movement, large vaccination and screening campaigns were implemented using high-risk strategies, which mainly focused on people at risk of getting a certain