24.11.2017

Press release

“We have to seek out risks in order to improve prevention.”

Swiss TPH On 22 and 23 November 2017, around 300 specialists from the fields of science, politics, NGOs and the private sector convened at the Congress Center Basel to discuss the topic of “Personalised Health from a Public-Health Perspective”. The conference was organised by Public Health Schweiz, the Swiss School of Public Health and Swiss TPH.

(...) “Chronic illnesses such as diabetes or cardiovascular diseases are on the rise around the globe,” she stressed, as did many other speakers at the conference. This trend is overwhelming the health care systems in developing countries. We need to rely more on primary prevention, which, in the majority of cases, is less expensive than treatment. Furthermore, we cannot forget: “Living with a chronic illness means living with a handicap, and even if that illness is being treated, it’s not the same as being healthy,” said Probst-Hensch.

“We have to seek out risks in order to improve prevention,” she emphasised. For public-health specialists, personalised health’s greatest potential lies in the fact that it allows us to use new methods to determine the risks for individual illnesses: “Research in the age of precision medicine will open up a completely new mechanistic, causal understanding of illnesses and wellness.” (Photo: Swiss TPH)