ABSTRACT
The public health movement in America has become almost as much of a lobbyist for an enlarged welfare state as a vehicle for promoting public health. The American Public Health Association publishes a compendium of the association's public policy statements from 1948 to the present which provides an interesting look into how the association's priorities have shifted in the past half century. In 1900 barely a million Americans lived in cities where the water supply was filtered. Shortly thereafter, another major public health improvement was the development and spread of municipal water filtration — to extract algae, certain minerals, pollution, and other substances — and disinfection of water supplies with chlorine. The public health interventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century resulted in a substantial reduction in mortality rates in America. The quarantine functions of government were nationalized in 1878, but state and local government health departments retained significant roles in public health.
