Making Better Babies: Public Health and Race Betterment in Indiana, 1920–1935

Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999: Healthier Mothers and Babies

At the beginning of the 20th century, for every 1000 live births, six to nine women in the United States died of pregnancy-related complications, and approximately 100 infants died before age 1 year (1,2). From 1915 through 1997, the infant mortality rate declined greater than 90% to 7.2 per 1000 live births, and from 1900 through 1997, the maternal mortality rate declined almost 99% to less th...

Public health ethics: informing better public health practice.

Public health ethics has emerged and grown as an independent discipline over the last decade. It involves using ethical theory and empirical analyses to determine and justify the right thing to do in public health. In this paper, we distinguish public health ethics from clinical ethics, research ethics, public health law and politics. We then discuss issues in public health ethics including: ho...

Travel Medicine in Qatar: Strategic Action for Better Public Health Outcome

Making humans better and making better humans

The last 10 years has seen the development and deployment of new biotechnologies not just as potential treatments but also as potential enhancements. The definition and differentiation of treatment (therapy) from enhancement is an ongoing clinical, ethical and social debate that ranges across a proliferating number of convergent technologies. Many of these innovations will ‘come-on-line’ as pre...

Malaria: poverty, race, and public health in the United States

anthologies of this type, new articles are added or the collection is typically given some freshness with the inclusion of a new introductory chapter by the author explaining the context, connections and interruptions within the articles' themes. But, apart from a short one-and-a-half page preface, there is nothing new in this volume. However, regardless of the book's production, the articles s...