Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. In constitutional democratic societies such as the U.
As elected officials, they are entrusted to provide leadership with the responsibility to generate public policy that will protect the rights and welfare of the people that they represent.
This basic mandate is challenged, when elected officials generate policies based on moral values that do not necessarily represent those of their constituencies. The American Public Health Association defines public health as promoting and protecting the health of people and the communities where they live, learn, work, and play; using research to identify risks of disease and injury; and acting to prevent them before they occur.
In broad terms, the public health mandate is to understand the relationship between the spread of communicable, infectious diseases, and how the environmental conditions and personal choices affect the mechanisms by which they are transmitted Walker, However, public health has also been used as a tool to further political agendas with limited concern for the control of disease.
Our current understanding of the management of communicable diseases as well as non-communicable conditions, such as diabetes, cardiac disease, and substance use disorders, is strongly rooted in evidence-based, scientific practices designed to increase the health and well-being of the populations served by our local, state, and federal governments Brownson et al.
