Page 31 - Social Marketing for Public Health Global Trends and Success Stories

57977_CH01_final.qxd:Cheng 11/5/09 4:32 PM Page 4

4 CHAPTER 1 ■ Social Marketing for Public Health: An Introduction

S O C I AL MAR KETI N G AN D PU B L I C H E ALTH

Defining Public Health
Throughout human history, the major health problems that individuals have
faced have been occurring at the levels of their communities, their countries, or
even the entire world (such as the control of transmittable diseases, the im-
provement of the physical environment, the quality and supply of water and
food, the provision of medical care, and the relief of disability and destitution).
Although emphasis placed on each of these problems has varied from time to
time and from country to country, “they are all closely related, and from them
has come public health as we know it today” (Rosen, 1993, p. 1).
In this book, a widely cited quotation by C.-E. A. Winslow, “the founder of
modern public health in the United States” (Merson, Black, & Mills, 2006, p. xiii), is
borrowed to define public health as:

the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical
health and efficiency through organized community efforts for the sanitation of
the environment, the control of communicable infections, the education of the
individual in personal hygiene, the organization of medical and nursing services
for the early diagnosis and preventive treatment of disease, and the development
of the social machinery which will ensure to every individual a standard of living
adequate for the maintenance of health; organizing these benefits in such a fash-
ion as to enable every citizen to realize his birthright of health and longevity.
(Winslow, 1920, as cited in Merson et al., 2006, p. xiii)
Public health has several distinguishing features:
• It uses prevention as a prime intervention strategy (such as the prevention of
illness, deaths, hospital admissions, days lost from school or work, or
consumption of unnecessary human or fiscal resources).
• It is grounded in a broad array of sciences (including epidemiology, biological
sciences, biostatistics, economics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology).
• It has the philosophy of social justice as its central pillar (so the knowledge
obtained about how to ensure a healthy population must be extended
equally to all groups in any society).
• It is linked with government and public policy (which have strong impacts on
many public health activities carried out by nonprofit organizations and/or
the private sector; Merson et al., 2006).

Social Marketing for Public Health

Social marketing has been widely used in solving public health problems, has fast
become “part of the health domain” (Ling, Franklin, Lindsteadt, & Gearon, 1992,