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Another theme that runs through this story is developing a culture of public health.
Not just a School of Public Health, important as that was -- there had been a small school before
and it's much larger and better now -- but public health as an idea,
the idea that you can prevent illnesses, that behaviour contributes to a healthier society,
that laws and policies and regulations can encourage healthier behaviour and reduce disease.
Those ideas that we take for granted in the West were relatively new in Viet Nam
and very few people were trained in and practicing those kinds of ideas at the time.
Cultivating a whole ecology of public health in Viet Nam is one of the most important contributions
that took place in this story, and it happened not just in the building of the school,
the training of the professionals, and the cultivation of policies in the government.
It happened in, for example, at the School of Public Health, advocating strongly and consistently
to require helmets on people who ride motorbikes, a source of fantastic crowding
in hospital emergency rooms, and terrible suffering in the population.
There are still accidents -- there are a lot of motorbikes in Viet Nam.
But the level of injuries is far down, and everybody wears a helmet.