Both old diseases that have existed for hundreds of years and the new diseases that have lately appeared recently pose challenges to human civilization. The COVID-19 outbreak, which started in 2019 and is still going, and the monkeypox virus outbreak, which was deemed a global public health emergency on July 22, 2022, both pose greater challenges to the state of global public health than HIV and tuberculosis, which have never been completely eradicated.

Since the 1990s, chronic diseases have become a major problem that seriously threatens human health and restricts social development, which has high incidence, high mortality, low awareness rate, low control rate and heavy economic burden. According to the World Health Organization, about 38 million people die each year from chronic diseases. Additionally, more than 2.1 billion people (nearly 30 percent of the global population) are overweight or obese, and obesity is associated with multiple chronic diseases, which means there is an urgent need for society to prioritize obesity prevention in the coming years [1]. Moreover, in the past two years, medical resources have been shifted from treating COVID-19 patients to prevent epidemics, with a corresponding decrease in offline visits, emergency room visits and hospitalizations for patients with chronic diseases. This may help to reduce the incidence of acute diseases such as myocardial infarction and stroke [2], but raise the mortality of conditions like dementia, cardiovascular disease and diabetes [3]. The long-term impact of the decline in the visit rate and hospitalization rate among patients with chronic diseases on patient prognosis and the health care system are still being studied [4]. Additionally, malignant tumors are also a bottleneck to the development of medicine. The prevalence of malignant tumors is rising as human life expectancy increases. It is well known that patients with advanced malignancies have a low quality of life, but in some areas, such as mainland China, palliative care services are extremely scarce [5].

In the modern society, COVID-19 is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of infectious diseases. Countries with large homeless populations may face unique challenges in addressing COVID-19 and homelessness. Homeless populations are more prone to spread infectious diseases because they lack access to basic health care, which may make the two issues worse [6]. People from different countries have different attitudes towards COVID-19 and vaccination. According to studies, Chinese and American respondents had very diverse preferences for the COVID-19 vaccine and distinct reasons for being hesitant [7]. This is typical of contemporary public health and may be one of the reasons why COVID-19 is so challenging to manage. But much as tuberculosis, once a terrible disease, now has a new treatment, such as the tuberculosis self-management mobile health intervention based on Integrated Theory of Health Behavior Change (ITHBC)[8], we believe that researchers will be able to carry out new and effective research in these areas. These are worth exploring further.

In addition to diseases that have received widespread public attention, there are also some diseases that people pay less attention to, such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which has great impact on people’s socio-economic development and can lead to other serious liver complications. NAFLD is a disease that few people outside the fields of liver and gastroenterology are familiar with, and there is currently no global public health campaign to address the disease [9]. In addition, there are many non-communicable diseases with low incidence but serious impact. We look forward to further exploration and sharing of results in these areas.

Current Research in Public Health (CRPH) is an international journal (ISSN: 2831-5162) dedicated to the latest advances in human Health. The goal of the journal is to provide a platform for physicians, health researchers, and academics to promote, share, and discuss health-related issues. Although the level of contemporary public health response has been greatly improved, there are still some problems, such as the capacity of health emergency teams to be improved, the early warning and monitoring system is not perfect, and the follow-up evaluation is not in place. We pay attention not only to the hottest events at the moment, but also to the diseases or events that are not hot but have a great impact on the population. To be exact, it is also a responsibility. What’s more, we also support the introduction of new perspectives to observe public health and explore the relationship between economic, educational resources and certain aspects of public health.

Overall, I am honored to be the editor-in-chief of CRPH, which reflects the international recognition of China's public health cause. We are building an excellent team to review each paper responsibly and quickly. To ensure fairness and justice, we will carefully screen reviewers and timely feedback comments. We welcome submissions from all over the world, especially constructive papers in the field of public health. CRPH will continue to provide more high-level, high-quality, and high-impact editorials, commentaries, reviews, original research and reports on existing issues at all levels of public health.

Conflicts of Interest

Yibo Wu is editor-in-chief of this journal.

Ethical statement

The research reported here has adhered to the relevant ethical guidelines.

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