Dear ladies and gentlemen,

The history of mankind has been marked by actions aposteriori, by reactions to already existing problems, and learning by trial and error. The most drastic consequences being in the areas of peace and human rights, health and ecology. The new public health is recognized by active and preventive actions in the areas of advocacy for peace and tolerance, establishment of healthy communication, health promotion and environmental health.

How difficult it is to make the necessary twist from consequences towards the causes in essential areas of human activities, such as environmental health, industry, health care, and, above all, in politics, has been shown by the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held recently in Johannesburg.

Unfortunately, there is no more room for making the same big mistakes we did in the 20th century, and our ship of global actions still resembles too much the Titanic: with music on board while the lower deck is already sinking. Listening to presentations given by many delegates at the Summit in South African Republic, I realized that we are still far away from a clear strategy for prevention of poor and unhealthy development. Instead, the mankind continues to adopt complex, more expensive and often inefficient strategies for elimination of consequences.

Health of the mankind is the best evidence that we have been burying our heads in the sand, and neglecting the issues. More than 2 million children die at the age up to 5 years of a disease we can cure with a simple medication. Acute respiratory diseases are the greatest killers of children, and along with diarrhea, take 3.5 million lives every year. Cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and cancer cause more than 60% of total deaths, and represent 80% of total disease burden of the mankind.

What should we do? Above all, there is a warning and a message: poverty affects our health and our lives. This is a viscious circle: the diseases cause and increase poverty as well. Are the globalization processes heading the opposite direction of the one causing such a situation? Do we have the strength and the option to stop this cycle of ‘negative history’? Do we have to be the barons of Munhausen to drag ourselves out of the mire to successfully solve the current problems?

No, because a quality of the intellect of the highest level lies in the ability to simultaneously hold in our mind two opposing thoughts: ‘This is a hopeless situation’, and at the same time ‘Here, this is how we are going to solve it!’ The need for the so-called ‘forward thinking’ has never been greater.

Promotion of good ideas, no matter whether about tolerance towards the differences, minorities, the weaker ones, or about change in risk behaviour, is what every policy, both in Croatia and worldwide, should have as its highest priority. Only when positive promotion and active prevention find their place on top of the policy priority list, will healthy policy and healthy society become inseparable. Unfortunately, the politics itself has too often been the source of numerous outbreaks of fear out of differences, intolerance, ethnic and racial hatred, exclusion of minorities or severely diseased from schools (diseased from kindergartens due to epidemics caused by unregulated waste waters or due to resistant viruses). The fight against both sources of social pollution should be the linking point of public health and politics.

We know that the importance of prevention in medicine is nothing new: Lister’s simple recommendation to wash your hands before a surgery saved many lives. Look at the polio example. We are still reluctant to remember the “steel lungs’ that kept the diseased children and adults alive. In 1961 and 1962, mass vaccination was done in Croatia covering all persons up to 20 years of age. The result was a drop in mortality, so polio became a rare disease, and the last case was registered in 1989.

Because of such successes, it is my great pleasure to be this night among so many important people from all continents and great many countries of the world. I believe you are activated by the same energy, drawn together by the same goal, and lead by the same thought: Health for All! The history of this organization, the “Andrija Štampar” School of Public Health, working together with the Croatian Institute of Public Health, has shown that gathering around a healthy and simple idea is the way how many things are achieved.

Much more than when generally accepted objectives and indisputable but endangered human values are being speculated on and made relative. Made relative the hazards of tobacco industry to health, support to chains of unhealthy food on pretence of finding a way out of stressful life, statements that air pollution by dioxine is not such a great hazard.

Even within the health care system, prevention in often neglected in practice, and complex diagnostic and treatment procedures seem far more important than simple prevention. The health care system has so far put to the front a disease, and not a man. There are two reasons for that: focusing on illness and not on health, and failure to see the social being as a whole. The shift of objectives is evident in the very education of health professionals: how many hours do physicians spend, out of a total of 5 thousand hours, studying ethics and bioethics, and communication skills, although their primary activity is communication with people? Is it strange then that we do not want our children to be in the same class with HIV positive girls? Even when we ourselves are physicians or medical nurses?

Positive thinking, health promotion, and disease prevention are based on a belief that a man and his potentials are the foundations of health economy of a nation. Such thinking made Andrija Štampar and his School of Public Health in the Rockefeller Street, named after him, and the people who worked in it, recognizable. Apart from Dr Andrija Štampar, those were teachers, physicians, engineers, film makers Berislav Borčić, Branko Cvjetanović, Drago Chloupek, Aleksandar Gerasimov, Branko Kesić, Josip Rasuhin, Ante Vuletić, etc.; to mention only a few of Štampar’s disciples who made our public health visible and recognizable around the world.

What was the formula for acceptance and success in collaboration with more than a hundred countries? Why did people come to Croatia, and still do, to acquire and generate knowledge on health? Because the founders of the “Andrija Štampar” School of Public Health believed that everyone is entitled to health, everyone has the right to equal access to health services, that nobody should be stigmatized or excluded for being ill, infected or just different. That there should be no insignificant people. That every nation and every individual should have the right to a quality biological and spiritual development. That the war is the greatest source of poverty and illness. Before, that was an issue of good faith, today there are thousands and thousands of scientific studies about it.

This is the reason why public health, as founded by Professor Andrija Štampar, is one of “the best products” Croatia gave to the world’s value system: foundation of the World Health Organization, development of health systems in many countries, eradication of epidemics, a postgraduate study in family medicine as the first in the world, health care for war afflicted populations, world awards at film festivals, discovery of new medicines. Perhaps only the ideas by Nikola Tesla swept more the world than the people who came to “Andrija Štampar” School of Public Health with their ideas and knowledge.

I regard myself and my family to be members of a large, numerous and rich family of public health professionals, many of whom are present here today. It is important to act for public health – to take part in actions promoting peace, social accountability, tolerance, unrisky behaviour, and health.

Distinguished participants of this celebration, representatives of the public,

There come the moments in our lives when we are invited to do great things. An even greater success is to do little things every day, with deep love and commitment. Public health is a series of little important things, it is about washing your teeth and your hands, about water supply system, about healthy food and food control, about traffic safety and injury prevention. It is about genetic epidemiology, biostatistics, bioethics, and technology assessment. It is simple and complex. It invites to new ways of thinking about opportunities for higher quality of life. It fights to add years to life, and life to years.

75 years of the “Andrija Štampar” School of Public Health is a story about success.