Originally posted as a thread on X.

The latest Amit Varma episode with Ajay Shah had this bit about public health vs healthcare. How public health is a subject of prevention, and the other is about the treatment after the public health system has failed. Prevention is almost always better than the cure.

Health is mostly the responsibility of the “health ministry” — which is dominated by doctors. Because of that, it is focused on healthcare as opposed to public health. It is something super obvious, but because of my limited reading, to put it in those words was new to me.

In the case of malaria — making sure there isn’t standing water so mosquitoes don’t breed is public health. In the case of COVID — masks and contact tracing (an element missing in the Indian scenario as pointed out by Shah) are elements of public health.

One of my closest friends is a public health professional, so I was asking her about this distinction between public health and healthcare. She mentioned how even having functional traffic lights and rules is a public health issue because it lets us prevent accidents.

It is a fantastic episode (not exactly about public health, but about the farm bills) that opened my mind to many things. This simply being one of them. Listen here.