Successes and missed opportunities in protecting our children's health: critical junctures in the history of children's health policy in the United States.

This article revisits several turning points in the history of child health policy for the purpose of understanding why many current health needs of children have not been addressed. We demonstrate how the rupture of ties between child medical and child welfare leaders, as well as the fault lines between various health care professionals, led to difficulties in establishing programs for children in the early 20th century. We note how wartime mobilizations helped to make the needs of the nation's youth apparent to political leaders and observe that programs begun in response to these discoveries often were ended in peacetime.

International efforts to control infectious diseases, 1851 to the present.

Many 21st-century observers explain international efforts to control infectious diseases as a function of globalization and recent transformations in international commerce, transportation, and human migration. However, these contemporary global health initiatives can be more fully understood by also exploring the origins of international health organizations and regulations, which were initially dedicated exclusively to stemming the tide of infectious epidemics. This article reviews 3 eras of international approaches to controlling infectious diseases (1851-1881, 1881-1945, and 1945 to the present) and concludes by assessing how nations have a strong fiscal and humanitarian incentive to invest in infectious disease control programs and infrastructures in and beyond their own borders.

Children's public health policy in the United States: how the past can inform the future.

As we struggle to respond to child public health problems in the twenty-first century, the past provides many core lessons. This paper explores three of them: the need to focus on the environment that makes children sick rather than on sick children; the need to attack the biggest problems, not the most scientifically interesting ones; and the need to provide services where children are most likely to be. To illuminate these lessons, we discuss important child public health efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.