You could say the term public health has a bit of an image problem.

It bubbles into the collective consciousness whenever there's a disease outbreak, measles,

legionnaires, Zika, Ebola, and of course COVID.

Oftentimes, it gets a bad rap, and that's because missteps and controversies

generate huge headlines, but the incremental successes, they often happen quietly behind the scenes.

And it's easy to see how if something like public health is out of sight, it quickly becomes

out of mind as well. Public health is often invisible.

Dangers fade from public consciousness.

Budgets and funding get cut.

Then institutional knowledge and valuable programs, they get lost,

and we risk losing much of the progress that we've made.

We're living through some of this now.

Nobody in the whole world, 8 billion people, nobody woke up this morning and said,

oh, thank goodness I didn't die from smallpox yesterday.

My guest today has been on the front lines of public health for decades,

most notably as former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

and before that as commissioner of New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Today, Dr. Thomas Frieden runs the nonprofit, Resolve to Save Lives, a global initiative to

combat the world's deadliest health threats. His book, The Formula for Better Health, is out later this month.

It's part history lesson.

It's part memoir.

And it's part blueprint.

...