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Public health needs to define its basic nomenclature. Public may refer to population, citizenry, society, inhabitants of a territory, and health is a concept that suffers from notorious ambiguity ranging from freedom of disease to a holistic state of well-being. Different meanings will strongly influence the traditional tasks of disease prevention and health promotion, codetermining whether screening programs will search for predispositions, subclinical disease manifestations, or genetic markers.Prevention continues to be the main goal of public health policies but, ever since risk epidemiology targets research to the study of socioeconomic determinants of health, the New Public Health has internalized these risks and transformed collective preventive actions into individual responsibilities of health care and disease prevention. Whenever public health challenges are shrouded in uncertainty and prevention cannot be knowingly applied, it is replaced by a precautionary approach which is ethically less reliable because subject to the negotiations of vested interests.Promotional campaigns often lack scientifically proven information. When public health resources are scarce, promotion should be used sparingly, for its effectiveness is difficult to assess. As for screening programs, they ought to respect the ethical requirement that only those conditions be explored that provide effective therapy or other clear advantages for people being screened.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-2026-2_8

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