Public health is about trust – something Cummings has wilfully ignored | Richard Coker

If the public is no longer reassured by the government ’s social distancing measures, I fear a second wave of coronavirusRichard Coker is emeritus professor of public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical MedicineSee all our coronavirus coverageCoronavirus – latest updatesThirty-five years ago, when I was working as a newly qualified doctor, I extracted a sausage from a woman ’s windpipe. She was, in the eyes of the ambulance crew who brought her in, probably beyond saving, possibly already dead. The woman had inhaled the sausage while laughing at a joke she’d been telling her family. I leant over her, used a laryngoscope to peer into her larynx, saw the sausage and extracted it. She took a big gasp, looked around in surprise, and after a short recovery, walked out of A&E. I felt a surge of pride. I was a proper doctor. I ’d saved someone’s life. My mum understood what I did for a living.After working as a clinician for many years, I became a public health researcher and worked on tuberculosis and emerging infectious diseases for about 25 years. I never got, with the same immediacy, the sense one gets from saving a life. But I suspect that through my research I ’ve touched far more lives than I could ever have hoped to in clinical medicine – even if those lives remain anonymous, distant, opaque. Inpublic health, the stakes of life and death are more distant – but no less impactful.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Coronavirus outbreak Science UK news Dominic Cummings Politics Source Type: news