Publications | UAB School of Public Health

The Handle

THE HANDLE, the magazine of the UAB School of Public Health, evokes the cachet, spirit, and intellectual courage of 18th-century British physician John Snow, who stands as a symbol of modern public health measures.

Snow’s breathtakingly simple act of removing the Broad Street communal water-pump handle to quell a cholera epidemic reminds us that we must look beyond our usual strategies to find new, creative ways of addressing the public health concerns of a world changed by terrorism, emerging infectious diseases, and shocking racial and ethnic disparities in health status and health care.

We must go beyond a landing-on-the-moon mentality that believes complex public health problems can be solved simply by throwing vast sums of money at them. Money is necessary, of course, but we need to figure out smarter ways of using resources to improve people’s health and well-being.