The impact of special interest groups on the perception and degree of risk to public health further complicates consensus building. An additional wrinkle on consensus building in occupational health is the class issue. These class issues are nuanced, however, during economic downturns, when job preservation takes priority over health and safety concerns, and in small business sectors, where owners who are employees themselves, may be subject to health hazards. The Double Message Society's desire for public health protection, but without limits on personal liberty, sends a double message to both the parties charged with assuring the public's health and those affected by it. These mixed signals are skillfully managed by those who wish to cast any public health agency solely as a regulatory body and thereby avoid discussing the benefits of regulation and enforcement.
Any cost appears pricey if one loses sight of what is being purchased.
The Politics of Public Health Further eroding OSHA's public health identity is the current embarrassingly shabby condition of the larger national public health agenda. Despite the availability of sound science that would ordinarily be used to guide public health policy, the governmental public health agenda at OSHA and elsewhere has become woefully politicized. The value of technical knowledge has clearly been downplayed and reshaped by political urgency. He was referring to the elimination of the office of the assistant secretary of health in the Department of Health and Human Services, an action that placed a number of health agencies under the supervision of a nonphysician secretary. An overreliance on management is not unique to OSHA or to government, but it became part of our business culture in the last decade and has remained there as a revered icon.