HOW CAN PUBLIC HEALTH ADAPT TO THE REALITIES OF A CHANGING PLANET?

Building on a proud history of innovation and progress, the new era of public health will need to embrace new ideas, new ways of working, new technologies and methodologies. As we look ahead to the challenges of the future on our changing planet, we can see 6 major ways that public health will need to change.

This new era of public health will need to harness opportunities to ‘leapfrog’ historical stages of technical, medical and social development and radically accelerate our progress.

We’ve seen examples of this kind of jumpstart already: from a pandemic that has catalysed the development of ‘plug-and-play’ vaccination, to the shortcuts provided by mobile telecommunications in Africa. We believe the Anthropocene will demand many more.

Leapfrogging in action

One example of this shift can be seen in the use of machine learning that is changing the way we work as medics and scientists – screening, ordering and labelling volumes of data and published research that would take any human many lifetimes to read. Artificial intelligence can swiftly identify research gaps, such as the under-representation of low and middle-income countries in the global evidence base on climate change and health. Read more.