Teach Health Science in school again

ON Aug 6, deputy director-general of the Health Ministry Datuk Dr Christopher Lee announced in the keynote address at a health conference that “emphasis is to be on maintaining health and preventing disease, not just on treatment (of disease).”

In the 60s and early 70s, there was a subject called Health Science in the secondary school curriculum. The topics included the structure and mechanism of the human body, common diseases like malaria and tuberculosis of the lungs and the cause and prevention of these diseases. (If one knows the cause, prevention would be so much easier.) The subject was taught up to Form 5.