Health and human rights

Abstract

In 1988, a seminal report by the United States Institute of Medicine defined the mission of public health as “ensuring the conditions in which people can be healthy.”4 In turn, this required those working in public health to consider the societal nature of these essential conditions in which people could achieve the highest attainable standard of physical, mental, and social wellbeing. Paradoxically, the discipline of public health has generally ignored the societal roots of health in favour of medical interventions, which operate further downstream. For example, public health efforts at preventing and …