Lifeworld-led care: Is it relevant for well-being and the fifth wave of public health action?

A recent paper has made the case for a “fifth wave” of public health action. The paper articulated the first four waves as focusing on civil engineering, the germ theory of disease, welfare reforms and lifestyle issues. This article will focus on well-being and will expand on the authors’ articulation of a current need to “discover a new image of what it is to be human” to begin to address the challenges of promoting well-being. This article will consider an alternative way of viewing human beings within a “caring” context and how this alternative view may aid this potential fifth wave of public health action. This alternative view has emerged from the work of Husserl who suggested that any human view of the world without subjectivity has excluded its basic foundation. The phenomenological understanding of “lifeworld” is articulated through five elements, temporality, spaciality, intersubjectivity, embodiment and mood that are all discussed here in detail. A world of colours, sparkling stars, memories, happiness, joy, anger and sadness. It is this “lifeworld’ that when health care or as argued in this article as public health becomes overly focused on decontextualized goals, and measuring quality superficially can be neglected

Studying Public Health Law::Principles, Politics, and Populations as Patients

Public health law is firmly establishing itself as a crucial area of scholarly inquiry. Its vital importance has been sharply underscored following the outbreak of COVID-19, in response to which we have seen the institution of extreme legal measures—suchas the UK’s Coronavirus Act 2020—in efforts to control and contain the spread ofthe disease. The pandemic has also starkly exposed the complex nature of the regulatory challenges, nationally, internationally, and globally, to which such public health problems give rise. In approaching these, and other questions concerning the public’s health, such as non-communicable disease, public health law, as a field, brings notable distinctive features: these include a practical focus on populations, institutions, the prevention of ill health, protection of good health, and thepromotion of positive states of well-being; and concomitant critical approaches rooted in theories of social justice as contrasted with more narrow biomedical ethics. Such features make it in some senses atypical territory within the field of health law. Furthermore, the inherent role of political institutions places law conceptually within public health in a way that may be seen as distinguishable from law’s relationship with clinical medicine. This chapter explains how the broad reach and distinct features of public health require a commensurately broad approach to conceptualising public health law, and how distinct practical and theoretical features may be integrated into academic public health law. It also shows how public health law, with its distinct conceptualisations concerning ‘the body’ of medical jurisprudence, can both challenge and enrich medico-legal studies, and bring important perspectives within the broader field of health law

Action to protect the independence and integrity of global health research

Storeng KT, Abimbola S, Balabanova D, et al. Action to protect the independence and integrity of global health research. BMJ GLOBAL HEALTH. 2019;4(3): e001746

Holographic optical element based single-mode hybrid fiber optic interferometer for realizing zero-order fringe

A holographic optical element (HOE) based single-mode hybrid fiber optic interferometer for realizing the zero-order fringe is described. The HOE proposed and used integrates the actions of a beam combiner and a lens, and endows the interferometer with high tolerance for repositioning errors. The proposed method is simple and offers advantages such as the elimination of in situ processing for the hologram

Synthesis and cytotoxic activity of sulfur linked mono / bis heterocycles

1173-1178A variety of sulfur linked mono / bis heterocycles have been prepared and their cytotoxic activity on A549 lung adenocarcinoma cells studied. The imidazolyl and benzimidazolyl thiadiazoles (7c, 8c) display appreciable cytotoxic activity against A549 cells