Public Health in Germany: a new “Golden Age”?

Abstract

Abstract The first “Golden Age” of public health beginning in the 1830s led to major improvements in population health, mainly through advances in hygiene and sanitation but also through social reform. Few decades later, the success of bacteriology as well as the increasing technical and economical potentials of biomedicine backgrounded social approaches. In the 1960s, social epidemiology began to thrive again in the UK. Germany followed with a major delay after the horrific misuse of population health by the Nazi regime. Today, public health in Germany is regaining strength. A renewed focus on basic research (e.g. genomics) and on economic exploitability without effective solutions to political challenges could, however, quickly terminate a second Golden Age.