A tribute to Mateusz Zatonski

Contribution presented at the 3rd Calisia Conference on Family Health, Kalisz, Poland, 18-20 June 2023
Mateusz Zatonski was one of the most talented public health researchers of his generation. As co-supervisor of his PhD, I was enormously privileged to know him and to learn from him.
In this short paper, based on a talk I gave when we commemorated his life, I offer some personal reflections on the state of public health today. This is a major challenge. So much has happened in the past few years. We have had a global pandemic that has killed millions of people prematurely. The impact of climate change is becoming ever more obvious, with worrying signs that we may soon be reaching a tipping point from which there is no going back. As the people of Poland are especially aware, we have a major war in Europe. Those of us outside Poland applaud this country’s support for the Ukrainian people in their struggle against the illegal Russian invasion of their country.
Three years ago, I was invited to join the Pan European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development, established by Hasn Kluge, the World Health Organisation’s Regional Director for Europe. This was an unusual group to talk about health. Most came from other areas, with three former presidents, two former prime ministers, and others from the financial sector, agriculture, and development banks, among others. I was privileged to chair its scientific advisory board and to write the evidence review that informed the work of the Commission [1].
Our task was to make recommendations that would ensure that Europe would be better prepared for the next crisis, given the many threats that existed. Our first task was to learn from the experience of the pandemic. This included the conditions that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to jump species and spread among humans. This took us into the area that we call OneHealth, the complex set of relationships that link humans, animals, and the natural environment, as well as the microorganisms that are constantly ready to exploit any opportunity that we give them. But, of course, the threats to public health go beyond infections. We devoted an entire chapter to the many risks that we face. Some, such as asteroid impacts, are existential threats to our species that are beyond our control. Seen from space, we are just one among many small and relatively insignificant rocks in a large and complex universe. But there are other existential threats that we...


View full text...