What happens to public health 'AFTERnow'?

Published On Wed 5 Feb 2014 by Grant Hill

'What's next for the health of society?' That's the question that will be asked at a public lecture hosted by the University of Dundee's Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience (CECHR) next week.

Phil Hanlon, Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow, has devoted his career to the challenge of improving health in Scotland. He will talk about his efforts to obtain fresh insights into some of the country's most intractable health problems when he appears at the Dalhousie Building on Thursday, 13th February.

Professor Hanlon heads up the 'AFTERnow' project, which investigates the impact of modern culture on health, considers the future of public health and asks how we, as individuals and members of society, should live.

'The UK has seen four phases of public health improvement since the Industrial Revolution,' said Professor Hanlon. 'Each emerged from major shifts in thinking about the nature of society and health itself. Each phase can be conceptualised, in metaphorical terms, as a 'wave'.

'Yet, public health now faces a series of challenges such as a loss of wellbeing, obesity, and addictive behaviour and wider threats including global warming, food security, and loss of biodiversity which are not amenable to the strategies that informed these previous waves. Do we, therefore, need a 'fifth wave'?

'I will argue that the fifth wave of public health builds on the need to integrate three categories - the true, the good and the beautiful, or science, ethics and aesthetics, which are ancient and derive from Platonic thinking.'

CECHR is a joint initiative between the University of Dundee and James Hutton Institute established in 2008 to provide a focus for novel interdisciplinary research addressing societal responses to environmental change and promoting sustainability.

'What's next for the health of society?' takes place at the Dalhousie Building, Old Hawkhill, at 4pm on Thursday, 13th February. Free tickets can be reserved by calling 01382 388692 or emailing cechr@dundee.ac.uk.

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