Over the past 100 years—the age of the Yale School of Public Health—advances in public health have made enormous contributions to human well-being and the quality of life for countless people.
Clean air standards have been implemented, health departments established, diseases eradicated, life expectancy increased and infant mortality reduced among many other gains.
And yet, in the early stages of the 21st century, the environmental health of the planet is in jeopardy as humans exploit natural resources to further drive industrialization and economic progress.
This ongoing degradation—such as shrinking rainforests, severe clean water shortages and rising world temperatures—pose serious challenges to human health and threaten to reverse many of the gains that have been made.
In a Centennial C.-E. A. Winslow Medal Award lecture, Judith Rodin, Ph.D., president of The Rockefeller Foundation, called for a new approach to public health—Public Health 2.0—that embraces planetary health in order to sustain and advance human health.
“The connection between the health of our planet and our own is abundantly clear,” Rodin told a large gathering in the lecture hall at the Yale University Art Gallery on November 2.
Rodin is the third recipient this year of the Winslow Medal as part of the school’s ongoing centennial celebration. Sir Michael Marmot and Dr. Anthony Fauci were each awarded the medal earlier this year. Sir Michael is an expert on health disparities and Dr. Fauci is a prominent HIV/AIDS researcher. Prior to the centennial, the medal has only been awarded to three other public health practitioners.
The Winslow Medal recognizes leaders in public health research, education and practice and is the school’s highest honor. It is named after Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, who founded public health at Yale in 1915 and today is recognized as a seminal figure in the early American public health movement. He led the school for some 30 years before his retirement in the mid 1940s.
Achieving Public Health 2.0 will not happen quickly or easily, Rodin cautioned. It will require substantial changes to existing public policy, the possible creation of new governmental agencies, educating the public and changing the way that health professionals are trained and work. Ongoing collaboration among experts with diverse specialties is needed to address the issues ahead.
“The challenges before us are serious. In some cases, even dire. But we can’t afford to shrug and hope for the best,” Rodin said. “I invite all of you to join in this mission.”
Rodin cited a new educational program at the Yale School of Public Health—Climate Change and Health @Yale—as an example of how academia needs to respond.
The challenges before us are serious. In some cases, even dire. But we can’t afford to shrug and hope for the best.
Judith Rodin, President, The Rockefeller Foundation
The Yale program, one of the first of its kind, includes new undergraduate and graduate courses that will debut in Fall 2016, two doctoral training positions, a case study on climate change and health for the M.P.H. core curriculum, a leadership training workshop for students, a climate change leader in residence, summer internships for students, a speaker series and pilot research grants for faculty.
Dean Paul Cleary welcomed Rodin, noting that she is the author or co-author of 15 influential books and has been recognized by Forbes magazine as one of the world’s 100 most powerful woman for three consecutive years.
“Her journey to this post [president of The Rockefeller Foundation] is marked by her lifelong dedication to the health and well-being of populations around the globe,” he said. “There are few people in the world who have had such a profound impact on global public health and resilience.”
The Rockefeller Foundation and the School of Public Health have a long and productive history. The Foundation worked with Winslow a few years after he founded public health at Yale to create better public health nursing education. This partnership led to the creation of the Yale School of Nursing in 1923. In 1964, the Foundation created the Yale Arbovirus Research Unit at the School of Public Health to study insect-borne diseases around the world. The unit brought many top researchers to the school, including a Nobel Prize winner, who made significant contributions to the fight against a host of diseases. The school’s multifaceted arbovirus research continues today.
Rodin told that gathering that she was delighted to be back at Yale, where she spent more than 20 years as professor and then provost of the university.
She noted that much has changed at Yale since her early days there. The university today is much more diverse and the many old barriers have since fallen. She related how she once had to go through a side door at Mory’s for a luncheon job interview. It was the only way that women could enter the then-all-male club. Still, more needs to be done to ensure that women around the world fully enjoy the advances in health and other areas that have been made.
“But that is a topic for another lecture,” she said.
As she began her talk, Rodin took a moment to recognize School of Public Health Professor Jeannette Ickovics, seated nearby and with whom Rodin worked with in the late 1980s when Ickovics was a young post-doc.
Ickovics, in turn, thanked Rodin for her many contributions to Yale and now to public health.
“You have stretched the boundaries of traditional thinking,” Ickovics told her former mentor.