Unit 3: Public Health

Fundamental change in disease perception & governance

• Focused on internal sanitary conditions and everyday life—cleanliness, waste removal, and environmental improvement.

• Disease control became embedded in urban infrastructure and social practices, not just medical interventions.

• Sanitation was framed as a technology of government tied to civil order and economic productivity.

• Public health shifted from a contagion-border model to a population-environment model where social and ecological factors matter as much as microbes

Impact of political-economic ideology of liberalism & laissez-faire

• Quarantine was bad for trade and movement, conflicting with free commerce.

• Epidemic prevention served commercial and political interests, embedding public health into urban governance rather than national isolation.

• epidemiological practices are co-produced with political economy

Integrating science into social governance

• Expanded disease control from clinical settings to urban systems, housing, and social environments.

• Institutionalize surveillance and reporting systems, nascent forms of epidemiological monitoring.

• Disease notifs and observation of environmental conditions opened biostatistics and public health metrics.

• Scientific practices (surveillance, statistics, sanitary engineering) become entangled

Community to Idvdl Behaviour

• “population” itself becomes the target of management.

• Citizens as targets of public health, not just passive subjects of quarantine (prisoners).

• Sanitation and public health are part of efforts to shape everyday practices and moral behaviors in the name of health.

• Health tech (sanitation public health) connected with governance strategies that try to influence social norms and personal responsibilities.

Epidemiology

Epidemiology is the scientific, data-driven study of

the distribution and determinants of health-related

states or events within specific populations.

20th Century Crisis in Epidemiology

Contradictory findings

• Problems with pathogenesis

• Bias sampling and hidden risk variables

• Produced critiques of about the scientificity of epidemiology, preferred

analytical approach, and professional statu

Molecular Epidemiology

The ways molecular biomarkers work:

• molecular biomarkers of exposure ids risk posed by substance in the environment

• molecular biomarkers of effect id the effects of substances in the environment. (from the prev risk)

• molecular biomarkers of intrinsic genetic susceptibility id risk resulting from inherited genetic traits, given environmental exposure.