In 1911, the American Public Health Association (APHA) inaugurated its own journal, which became the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) in 1912. The APHA understood the need to provide an independent place for the science it hoped would underpin public health policy, a place independent from corporate or partisan interests. For more than a century, AJPH has played exactly that role, and sometimes has been supported at great cost by the APHA through difficult economic times.
The history of AJPH has been told several times (https://bit.ly/408SI2r; https://bit.ly/4frDXMo; https://bit.ly/3BxIIpZ).
The version of the Journal I have been the Editor-in-Chief of appeared with its first new format in January 2016. We published since then so many groundbreaking works that it is not easy to single out just one topic covered by year among them. The covers of those I have selected are printed here: the drinking water disaster in Flint, Michigan (2016); the estimated prevalence of transgender persons in the United States (2017); the 100-year anniversary of the great 1918 flu, which was prescient of the coming COVID-19 pandemic (2018); 350 years of slavery in North America after 1619 Jamestown (2019); “We are not all in this pandemic together” (2020); the evolving theory and practice of intersectionality (2021); the harassment of the public health workforce (2022); population-based public health monitoring (2023); and excess mortality because of COVID-19 in US states (2024).
AJPH is a beacon of knowledge in the field of public health. What is its future? We have decided to place this yearlong celebration under the theme of “Threats to democracy are threats to public health” and invite our editors, authors, reviewers, and other involved parties to reflect on this new political and institutional context in the United States and in many other parts of the world, in which people having a declared antiscience stand are accessing the handle of public health institutions and threatening to wipe out decades of progress.
We are confident that most of our populations support public health. They showed it in getting vaccinated in unexpectedly high proportions in all states during COVID-19 and in complying with public health mandates. The paradox is that the noisy minority that does not trust public health may find itself at the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Office of the Surgeon General.
We still need to see what they will do in practice, but we will keep playing our role as an independent source of scientific knowledge and a place where all opinions that are science-based can dialogue.
Biography
