In this blog, we will explore the role of pathogen genomics in UK biosecurity and how we are developing our genomic systems to better protect public health in the UK.
Medicine is there to help you and having screening and treatment is a good thing, right? Well, there’s a growing body of scientific concern that some testing is ‘over-diagnosing’ patients – that is, finding medical problems that may never cause …
Field epidemiology is one of the mainstays of examining outbreaks of infectious disease. Public Health England’s field epidemiology service (FES) contributes to investigating anything from the more common food poisoning incidents to the more exotic such as the new MERS-Coronavirus recently identified …
Microbiology is the study of microscopic organisms such as viruses and bacteria. In the past as microbiologists we would have relied on growing, staining and peering down microscopes as a way of identifying and characterising clinically important organisms, such as …
Obesity can sometimes be hard to spot, even though it’s all around us. Take parents, who think their child is about the right weight, even when the child is actually overweight or obese – this happens to nearly one in …
Alcohol is England’s second biggest cause of premature deaths behind tobacco. 34 per cent of men and 28 per cent of women exceeded current consumption guidelines on at least one day in the last week. Public Health England, in partnership …
In my previous blog I talked about my vision for integration and the importance of putting people at the heart of care. To bring this to life we published Health and Care Integration – making the case from a public …
In the past month, windstorms and flooding have been knocking at our doors more frequently than we would like. Like an unwelcome guest, severe weather brings with it many problems and often ones that are not always easily visible. It …
English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon once said, “Knowledge is power”. The more of it we have, the better informed and equipped we are to address any issues and drive improvements. And this too is true for health. Within Public Health …
Food poverty, or insecurity, is a personal tragedy for many people. More than 350,000 people had to turn to emergency food banks between April and September this year, according to the Trussell Trust, one of the largest providers of food …
At Public Health England we recognise that having a good job is one of the most reliable determinants of good health, so I’m delighted to be able to reflect upon the many and varied ways that we, as a public …
