Precision public health must get political
As the Precision Public Health Asia conference approaches, Kent Buse and colleagues caution that the specialty risks becoming a high tech fix for deeply political problems In The Time Machine by HG Wells, a Victorian scientist travels into the future to witness a society with deep inequalities between two devolved species. This dystopian future is built on a long forgotten history of technical advance, division, and exploitation. It is a cautionary tale: without tackling structural inequality, no level of technological progress can prevent social decline. Scientific innovation without justice, and greater knowledge without action, risk reinforcing stasis over structural reform. Precision public health is a specialty with radical potential that applies emerging technologies to public health policy and implementation. It has the potential to reallocate resources through predictive equity models1 to improve structural determinants of health, democratising governance by embedding community
