Leren van rokers en dikkerds

Public reactions on vaccinations campaigns and health promotion programmes demonstrate that public trust in public health measures is not self evident any more and public health is struggling with her mission and her approach. In the last decades public health developed primarily as an instrument for politics and policy, and to realize this policy orientation public health became a rather technocratic discipline. The process of rationalization of public health implies that the distance between public health and society has increased and that public health does not respond to processes of democratization of society and democratization of knowledge claims with respect to risks and health. To fulfill her social ambitions, public health needs to reflect on the relationship between politics, experts and citizens and has to start interaction with society instead of developing policies, advices and instruments in an ivory tower. In other words, public health has to return to her core business, the public!