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1 Health & Hum. Rts. 229 (1994-1995)
Human Rights and the New Public Health

handle is hein.journals/harhrj1 and id is 238 raw text is: Editorial HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE NEW PUBLIC HEALTH The exciting and rapidly advancing dialogue between health and human rights is helping to define more clearly the challenges and perspectives of a new approach to public health. Public health has a complex intellectual and operational history, within which there is a long and respected tradition of understanding health as linked with various social realities, ex- pressed or analyzed through occupation, socioeconomic or class structure, or political economy. Yet in recent times, public health (herein labelled for simplicity as traditional) has overempha- sized the biomedical aspect of its heritage. Indeed, to a surpris- ing extent, many people, including public health professionals, still confuse medical care with health. In fact, when analyzing health, the evidence is abundant and clear: societal factors are the major determinants of health status. Nevertheless, the com- bined influence of biomedicine, interest in technology and un- certainty about how to identify or respond to societal factors has led traditional public health to function within a paradigm that considers disease to be a dynamic event occurring within a basically static or fixed society. This view of disease as external, invading societies which would presumably otherwise enjoy good health, frames a problem such as cancer in the following terms: We have a cancer problem; now what can we do about it, within the given- the existing social system? Inevitably, this framing and definition of the problem leads to a focus on individual be- havior. Individual behavior is implicitly assumed to be largely a matter of choice. In turn, the major public health effort is then directed toward creating programs to help change individual be- havior, without addressing, or even knowing how to address, the societal issues which frame and create environments of risk for cancer. By providing information and a range of health services HEALTH AND HUIVLAN RiGHTS 229

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