The house is in a terrible state
The house is in an abysmal condition. like where the food came from or how it was made
In the 1950s, American orthopedic surgeon and noted sports car fanatic Dr. John States was working as a physician at the Watkins Glen International Speedway in New York State. While on the job, Doctor States witnessed countless high-speed crashes but he noticed that even though the race cars were going much faster than cars on the highway, the drivers were actually more likely to walk away from crashes without serious injury compared to drivers on the open road. Doctor States credited this to safety precautions like seat belts and helmets, which at the time were few and far between, and driving-related deaths and injuries in the U.S. were skyrocketing.
Dr. States knew that a change was needed and over the next several decades he conducted research on severe crashes, and even designed and patented his own seat belt. He became one of the country’s leading advocates of seat belts and challenged policymakers in New York to improve automotive safety. Finally, in 1984, New York became the first U.S. state to mandate the use of seat belts, thanks largely to Dr. States’s decades of work. Today, 49 states have adopted similar seat belt laws and seat belt use has continued to grow from 11 in 1981 to around 90 in 2020, saving almost 15,000 lives in 2017 alone, while cutting the risk of serious injury by 50 percent.
Looking back, we might call this an almost perfect fairytale ending to a story about how public health and policy can come together to improve and save lives, but it’s not always so simple in the moment. If you’ve been paying attention since about 2020, you’re no doubt familiar with the tension that can come with crafting health policy when public health crises arise. The people who make policies can often find themselves in the difficult position of having to balance some people’s freedom to do what they want with other people’s right to be healthy.
Hi, I’m Vanessa Hill and this is CrashCourse Public Health. We talk about health and policy, we’re talking about policies that change human behaviors or their environments to improve overall health and well-being - that’s health policy. It sounds simple enough, but sometimes it can get complicated. Like, consider the issue of smoking in indoor public settings. This impacts the health of the smoker, but also the health of the non-smoking people around them, because they can wind up inhaling the same potentially harmful chemicals that that smoker is inhaling voluntarily. Governments have struggled for a long time with how to tackle this issue, but it wasn’t until 2004 that Ireland became the first country in the world to ban smoking in all indoor workplaces.
These smoking bans, as well as seat belt laws like the ones recommended by Dr. States, are an example of a mandate or a legal order that tells people or companies how to act. Again, assuming that you’re living in a world that was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of a mandate may be familiar to you. But policies don’t and often can’t just tell people to be healthier, so policy makers need a few different tools in their health policy toolbox. Some of these tools are policies that aim to educate people. Take healthy eating for instance. There’s no all-knowing frozen pizza bagel police who are going to come knocking if we’ve had one pizza bagel too many (which today, as a non-American, I learned is actually just a bagel with pizza toppings on it). But flip that pizza bagel box over and we see a list of nutrition facts that are there to remind us exactly what we are and aren’t putting into our bodies.
In the U.S., those nutrition facts are there because of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which was signed in 1990 and basically says that people have a right to know what they’re putting into their bodies. This is why even the most eye-catching, mouth-watering, stomach-grumbling food packaging out there still needs to clearly feature those also recognizable nutrition facts. This can include other information too, like where the food came from or how it was made. More than 60,000 people had died from the syndrome globally, prompting citizens in the US to form the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), an organization that protested the FDA’s slow and opaque drug approval policy, which resulted in thousands of deaths due to lack of access to life-saving drugs. Following widespread protests around the country, the approval process was accelerated, and better information about the disease and treatment became more widely available to the public and public health community.
Policies are an opportunity to break down barriers to health and improve health for everyone, but without continued evaluation of our policies and without placing affected communities and health experts at the forefront of policy efforts, these policies can also lead to health inequities and systemic failures that let people down. Health policies are important, but for health to truly improve for everyone, health should be considered in all our policies, whether they’re about car safety, air pollution, or even pizza bagels.
This episode of Crash Course Public Health was produced by Complexly in partnership with the American Public Health Association. To learn more about public health, head over to APHA’s YouTube channel to watch That’s Public Health, a series created by APHA and Complexly.
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