Released Today! How to Save Millions of Lives—Including Your Own
The Formula for Better Health is OUT NOW.
The Formula for Better Health is available for purchase today!
Public health is under attack.
I wrote The Formula for Better Health: How to Save Millions of Lives—Including Your Own because public health is not about somebody else—it’s about you.
It’s about your health, your children’s and your family’s.
Every day, preventable infections, cancers, heart attacks, and strokes kill thousands of Americans and tens of thousands around the world.
We can prevent these deaths.
Until recently, most health disasters were unavoidable. Public health had been like Cassandra, the priestess from Greek mythology who could see the future but was cursed: No one believed her warnings and therefore didn’t act to prevent the disasters she predicted.
Now we have the tools to break this curse.
“Hope is what The Formula for Better Health is best at giving us—that the shoe leather work of public health, creating systems to generate data, identifying programs to tackle causes of disease, and then implementing, still has a place, and an important one, in creating a better world.”
— The Lancet
In The Formula for Better Health, I draw on decades leading New York City’s health department after 9/11, directing the CDC during the Ebola epidemic, and working with others to fight tuberculosis and other lethal threats in India and around the world to reveal how we can defeat the world’s deadliest diseases. All proceeds from book sales will to support projects and organizations that save lives around the world.
In The Formula for Better Health, you’ll step into laboratories that solve mysteries and expose deadly deceptions. You’ll meet a trailblazing epidemiologist who survived a Nazi concentration camp, a seventeenth-century cloth merchant who discovered public health’s superpower, and a brilliant Irish doctor knighted for unlocking the cure for tuberculosis. You’ll learn how disease detectives ended the largest outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the United States, what caused the deadliest mistake during the COVID pandemic, why we ignore urgent medical warnings. Most importantly, you’ll find out how to stop today’s leading killers.
“The Formula for Better Health provides unique, critical insight into stopping epidemics and preventing deadly diseases from one of the most successful health leaders in a generation.”
— Anthony S. Fauci, MD Former Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States
Two hundred years ago, no one could have predicted that typhoid, tetanus, trachoma, and other infections would be rare in much of the world and receding in the rest. Public health has saved millions of lives, and it can save millions more. Although progress isn’t inevitable, our world is healthier, more connected, and has better tools than ever in human history, and when we work together to implement the formula millions of people will enjoy longer, healthier lives.
The Formula for Better Health will help you understand what public health is, why it’s important, what we can do to support it, and how to succeed. It will empower you with an approach and information to make decisions that will lead to live a longer, healthier life so you can do what you want to do for longer.
Praise for The Formula for Better Health
Elizabeth Kolbert, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction:
Clear solutions for today’s deadliest health threats.
Cass R. Sunstein, author of Climate Justice and Nudge:
A superb book. Read it! The life you save might be your own.
Helene Gayle, MD, President Emerita, Spelman College and former President and CEO of the international organization CARE:
A masterclass in improving health at scale. Frieden transforms decades of global experience into actionable insights to protect and improve your health and that of your family, community, our nation and our world.
Bill Frist, MD, former United States Senate Majority Leader and co-chair of the Future of Health Advisory Board at the Bipartisan Policy Center:
Based on a masterful distillation of global health victories, Dr. Frieden reveals critical personal and community steps for longer, healthier lives.
Dr. Frank Luntz, Political Commentator, Analyst, and Pollster:
Tom Frieden is the most effective health messenger there is. His book, The Formula for Better Health is succinct, specific, and powerful.
Vivek Murthy, MD, former Surgeon General of the United States and author of the New York Times Bestseller Together:
A powerful guide to better health from one of the world’s leading health experts. As we face today’s urgent threats, Tom Frieden offers a path forward with trademark clarity and wisdom.
Dr. Tom Frieden is author of The Formula for Better Health: How to Save Millions of Lives – Including Your Own.
The Formula for Better Health draws on Frieden’s four decades leading life-saving programs in the U.S. and globally. Frieden led New York City’s control of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, supported India’s efforts that prevented more than 3 million tuberculosis deaths, and led efforts that reduced smoking in NYC.
As Director of the CDC (2009-2017), he led the agency’s response that ended the Ebola epidemic. Dr. Frieden is President and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, partnering locally and globally to find and scale solutions to the world’s deadliest health threats.
Named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People, he has published more than 300 scientific articles on improving health. His experience is, for the first time, translated into practical approaches for community and personal health in The Formula for Better Health.