A court in Johnson County, Kansas sentenced a mentally ill juvenile to life in prison with no chance of parole for 50 years. Andrew Ellman was convicted of murdering his mental health worker, Terri Zenner.

The defendant was 17 years old when he killed the victim. Because he was a juvenile at the time of the incident he was not eligible for the death penalty.

His victim, Teri Zenner, was 26 years old and recently married when he killed her. She worked for Johnson County Mental Health trying to help Andrew Ellmaker learn skills and find a job. She stopped by Ellmaker’s Overland Park home on August 17, 2004, for a routine home visit.

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Acheson’s definition of public health as “The science and art of promoting health, preventing disease, and prolonging life through the organized efforts of society” 1 clearly brings to the fore two important aspects- Health and its promotion. Public health is a social and political concept aimed at the improving health, prolonging life and improving the quality of life among whole populations through health promotion, disease prevention and other forms of health intervention2. Public Health encompasses all factors that can improve the health of the community 3. It is both an art and a science. Beaglehole and Bonita4 identified the essential elements of public health to include: collective responsibility, partnership with the people served; emphasis on prevention; prime role of the state in protecting and promoting the public’s health; and recognition of the underlying socio-economic determinants of health and diseases 5-7.

Diseases are at the centre of all health targets, and this has prompted the shift and several distinctions in health promotion literature2, 8-12 between public health and a new public health. The new public health has, at its heart, the need to emphasize the significant different approaches to the description and analysis of the determinants of health, and the methods of solving public health problems. The WHO definition of health as “a state of complete physical, social and mental well being…” 2, 13 was therefore seen as the first conscious attempt to emphasize health in its holistic nature. Holistic, in that it takes into account the separate influences and interaction of these dimensions of health.

Health, nay, this new public health 10 is further distinguished by its basis in a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which lifestyles and living conditions determine health status, and recognition of the need to mobilize resources and make sound investments in policies, programmes and services which create, maintain and protect health by supporting healthy lifestyles and creating supportive environments for health. This new face is Health-Promotion 2, 10, 11.

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