How will personalised medicine change public health practice?

Abstract

Personalised medicine is challenging core elements of public health practice to bring about a paradigm shift. Traditional public health activities such as prevention, screening programmes, infectious diseases control, financing and planning of health systems will all be affected by developments in genomics. There is a need to move away from the traditional high-risk versus population approach debate and to engage with concepts of population stratification and public health genomics. Public health through its activities of surveillance, needs assessment, education and policy advocacy has a critical role to play in shaping the entry of personalised medicine into health systems.