Technology

The Future of Public Health Assigned case study.

Imagine that you are living in the year 1900. You work on your family farm tending to the fields and animals and you are only expected to live into your mid-forties. Your house has no indoor plumbing and you need to work daily to prepare everything that you eat and drink. You do not have easy access to other people or information, and you only went to school for a few years before you began working on the farm. This is a very different reality from your current life. You now likely work outside of your home, enjoy many innovations like a flushing toilet and cellphone, and are expected to live quite a bit longer.

Many changes to daily life were a product of public health programs, interventions, and innovations. As we continue to grow and develop, the dynamic field of public health grows with us. Consider the medical research using stem cells: While many consider the results of using embryonic stem cells to be promising, moral and ethical issues arise with their use, according to James Gallagher (2013). Gallagher reported that scientists in the U.S. were able to use similar methods to those that produced Dolly, the first cloned mammal in 1996, to generate embryonic stem cells. While using this method may be more expensive and complex than other currently available sources, such as adult stem cells, the groundwork may have been laid for continuing to use cloning technology to bypass the problem of rejection.

Question

1. Is future technology the answer to some of these issues?