Smoking falls to lowest level, other public health wins

Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Dr. Jay K. Varma’s reports in your inbox a day early.Hello and welcome to Healthbeat’s weekly report on stories shaping public health in the United States.I am Dr. Jay K. Varma, a physician, epidemiologist, and public health expert currently serving as chief medical officer at Fedcap, a global nonprofit focused on economic mobility and well-being for vulnerable communities. Views expressed here are my own.I often write about what’s not working in public health. This week, I want to focus on a few recent studies that show what is working in public health — from reducing tobacco use to preventing one of the world’s deadliest killers — and put it in the context of how we think about interventions to avert illness and death in large populations.What interventions work best in public health?When we are trying to improve the health of a population, we try to choose interventions that benefit the largest number of people for the longest amount of t