PUBLIC HEALTH
NEW LAWS AND POLICY CHANGES PROMISE TO
IMPROVE HEALTH
AUTHOR Sarah Moyer, MD, MPH
P
ublic health is undergoing its third
revolutionary modernization, apt-
ly named Public Health 3.0. The
promise of this modernization is
the sort of sweeping societal im-
provements we first saw in the early
1900s with the advent of vaccines
and sanitation. Unfortunately, life
expectancy, for the first time since the great flu pandemic of 1918,
has declined for the last three years in the US (Kenneth D. Ko-
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LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
chanek et. al., December, 2017). Furthermore, there is clear lack of
progress on health equity (Frederick J. Zimmerman & Nathaniel
W. Anderson, June 28, 2019).
Improvements in Louisville’s collective life expectancy and qual-
ity of life will not be made in the lab or the exam room, but through
developing better social policy and advocating for policy change.
PUBLIC HEALTH MODERNIZATION
Public Health 1.0 began in the late 19 th century, when health policy