Public Health protection - Essay Example

Although bacteriology was apparently vital for the re-conceptualisation of infections, this process was in progress, and some studies show that there were no important purposes of the new knowledge of communicable diseases in the practice of public health (Lewis & MacPherson 2007). In Australia, when diphtheria was interpreted in bacteriological terms, an array of frequently conflicting public health practices and policies were sought in rapid progression. These succeeding public health processes consequently formed the partial bacteriological interpretation of diphtheria and of the control measures for contagious diseases (Lawson & Bauman 2001).

From the beginning of ‘immunisation’ and notification obligations in the late nineteenth century, public health policy changed quite rapidly to mass swabbing movements in the early twentieth century, wherein ‘carriers’ were the major, nearly special, regard (Lawson & Bauman 2001). Detection of the failure of these movements since 1922 became the foundation of an executive plan towards mass immunisation, but its slow operation implied that immunisation only slowly replaced cleansing habits and carrier control as the primary preventive strategy.

Each of these policies were products of bacteriological understanding and methods, but embodied immeasurably various practices and ideas of prevention (Lewis & MacPherson 2007). Management of diphtheria fulfilled a vital function in the advancement of public health policies and institutions in Australia. Historians have diversely examined plague, typhoid, tuberculosis, smallpox, and scarlet fever as infections of political and cultural significance in the moulding of public health in British colonies and in Australia in the nineteenth century (Lewis 2003a).

Nonetheless, the childhood infection of diphtheria has been deficient of the attention that practitioners think it deserves. Demonstrated statistically, politically and