Public Health Intervention

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Pages: 3

To begin this essay’s resolution I want to address a few questions related to my essays thesis, what is “the public” of public health and should we hold institutions or individuals accountable for the transgressions of public health interventions? In regards to whether individual researchers should be held accountable versus institutions, I argue that the line between them is indistinguishable. For the sake of simplicity, many times I connect the responsibility for the many presented travesties to the principal investigator or integral team of researchers. However, as we see in the provided example when it comes to outrage and blame, who and what is responsible becomes dependent on a successful conviction. Cases where the public health intervention …show more content…
Childress separates “the public” into three concepts the numerical public, the political public, and the communal public. In the numerical public, the individual is treated as a unitary constituent of the target population of an intervention, issues regarding the public in this definition are strictly utilitarian and are usually issues of measurement. However, the political public is the public represented by those in power, those who are not represented politically by elected representatives and state officials do not make up this public. In this definition issues take on a political nature as issues of the public that are addressed and funded represent the issues elected officials could agree on and the issues that the opposing parties disagree with. Finally, the communal public is distinguished as a gathering of our collective actions rather than our personhood, in this framework those who have more resources and clout are capable of producing more sway on the discourse of public health and securing their own health, whereas those without resources have their health largely subject to the will of the resourceful (Childress et. al, pg. 362). I argue that previous interactions between the public and public health researchers prove that that the proper definition of "the public" of this essay would be a mix of the communal public and the political public, meaning that those who lack resources and are disproportionately unrepresented in the political arena have the least sway on the discourse of public health and are unable to easily secure “health” as they would personally define it. This definition explains why the impoverished black men of the Tuskegee incident were given such a fallacious public “service” that allowed for their biological equality only after their extreme