Frightening to friendly: the evolution of public health information

摘要

Most community pharmacies display a public health poster or two-whether it's a smiling post-jab Trevor McDonald encouraging over-65s to get their free flu vaccine,or an approachable pharmacist offering clinical advice for your ailments.But public health campaigns haven't always been this friendly,and a new exhibition,’Can Marketing Save Lives? A century of public health marketing campaigns’at the Museum of Brands,London,charts the evolution of health messages over the past hundred years.The exhibition,curated by Public Health England,begins with the First World War,which led to a boom in mass information campaigns encouraging Britain to eat and drink moderately to support the war effort;to improve personal hygiene;and to practise safer sexual behaviours.Posters employed the brash and demanding techniques of the advertising industry at the time.The interwar years saw a better understanding of how disease is spread and prevented,as well as the emergence of several vaccines.A national diphtheria vaccine programme was introduced in the UK in 1942,and the exhibition features an accompanying poster that struck fear into mothers of young babies,and contributed to reducing deaths from the disease from over 3,000 in 1940 to just 6 in 1957.