News Team member Clara Silvestri recommends John Green's "Everything is Tuberculosis," for its compelling reminder of how a curable disease still ravages human lives.
The former CDC Director describes how to stop public health disasters from happening in the first place.
by Ananya Dash
Journalist and author Maryn McKenna interviewed Tom Frieden about his new book, “The Formula for Better Health: How to Save Millions of Lives—Including Your Own” on Mar. 19, 2026, for the Health Storytelling live Q&A from the Center for the Study of Human Health.
In his book, Dr. Tom Frieden shows his readers the path to effective prevention and treatment for diseases in order to prevent disability and deaths caused by them. Frieden describes this strategy as a formula that can close the gap between what we know and what we do, in order to save millions of lives. Public health efforts have focused on giving us the number of people who are sick due to a particular disease or die because of it. But Frieden advocates for reporting, recording, and measuring the outcomes of public health initiatives to constantly improve them. This approach, he believes, can stop people from getting sick or dying early.
Frieden explains that human believe that they have free will to control their health. However, powerful industries such as the tobacco industry, or junk food manufacturers, engineer their products to be addictive. They shape the narrative of what we consume everyday and in turn, hold immense power to affect our health, whether we see it or not.
Hence, the first part of his formula delves into “seeing” the hidden trends in diseases and why we ignore warnings that can potentially save us. Frieden, during his time as the Health Commissioner of New York City, made tobacco use as the top challenge to tackle. On the surface, they thought that they had made great strides in reducing tobacco use because of their massive success in making restaurants and bars smoke-free. But because they measured the results of their work, they realized that their progress had stagnated and they needed to do something new.
In the second part of his formula, Frieden describes the need to “believe” that eradicating a public health issue is possible despite how inevitable it looks. Looking at past public health wins, creating phases of public health programs not pilots, and cultivating optimism are ways to make progress. Frieden highlights how vaccines have helped the society to live happier and healthier lives and push us to keep making even more progress. On the flip side, he uses vaccine hesitancy as an example to highlight the need to “see” who is benefiting from driving vaccine misinformation.
In his final part of the formula, Frieden suggests both public health initiatives and individuals can “create” simple strategies to have the biggest difference in health. Much health and wellness advice floats around in media. But Frieden focuses on six ways to care for our bodies to lead a healthy life.
Public health initiatives saves millions of lives every year. Frieden’s book shows us the impacts of those initiatives since they are invisible to us thanks to prevention or eradication.
The Formula for Better Health: How to Save Millions of Lives—Including Your Own is available on bookshop.org. The Health Storytelling Author Q&A series is available on YouTube and continues at 6pm on April 22, 2026 with Jason Gale. Please RSVP here for Gale’s Q&A on his book AFTER COVID: The Health Impacts That Will Last Generations.
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