The Common Logic of Prevention

How Fire, Crime, and Disease Share a Blueprint for Public Health

Fire, crime, and disease may seem unrelated. One involves firefighters, another police officers, and the third, medical professionals and public health officials. However, the prevention of each uses the same principles of foresight, trust, and design. Prevention requires recognizing risks early, strengthening communities before disaster strikes, and shaping environments that make harm less likely. Measures such as smoke alarms, streetlights, or vaccine programs save lives, health, and money by shifting the focus upstream, from reaction to anticipation.

Smoke Alarm, Streetlight, Vaccine

Public health aims to prevent people from getting sick or injured. The work of pioneers Benjamin Franklin, Robert Peel, John Snow, and Richard Doll showed that the same fundamentals apply to different threats to life, well-being, and property.

Benjamin Franklin and Fire Prevention

October 5-11, 2025, was Fire Prevention Week.

In 1735, Franklin warned that colonial cities were expanding without regard to safety. Wooden homes were built too close together, open flames were used for light and heat, and there was a lack of organized fire protection. Writing in the Pennsylvania Gazette, he urged citizens that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

One year later, he founded the Union Fire Company, one of America’s first volunteer brigades. He realized that safety depended on civic responsibility. Citizens needed to keep their chimneys clean, stockpile water, and aid each other in times of need.

That sense of shared duty evolved into today’s building codes, inspections, and fire departments. A 2022 study showed that investing just 1% of a fire department’s budget into fire prevention can yield a return on investment that is 1,000 to 10,000 times greater than fire suppression efforts. A recent report on house fires showed that the combination of sprinklers and smoke alarms in U.S. homes resulted in almost 90% fewer deaths compared to those without them during the period 2019-2023.

Franklin’s legacy of fire prevention and suppression still stands and serves as a model for addressing other hazards.

Robert Peel and the Prevention Principle of Modern Policing

A century after Franklin, Sir Robert Peel faced a crisis of rising crime and eroding trust in industrial London. As Home Secretary, he created the Metropolitan Police Service in 1829. Peel articulated his famous policing principles. These beliefs were centered on the prevention of crime and disorder through legitimacy and public trust.

Peel’s vision was revolutionary. Officers were to be citizens in uniform, maintaining public approval rather than ruling by fear. Success was to be measured not by arrests, but by the absence of crime.

These principles became the foundation of community policing, relying on visibility, restraint, and legitimacy. For example, in response to escalating gun violence, community-based violence intervention (CVI) programs have reduced gun violence and violent crime in communities by up to 60% over the past two decades. An August 2025 report from the Albany (New York) Violence Prevention Task Force outlined specific strategies to target prevalent crimes, such as aggravated assault and larceny, while emphasizing the importance of community-led solutions

Just as Franklin did, Peel emphasized prevention first.

John Snow and the Map That Stopped Cholera

While Franklin and Peel built civic systems, Dr. John Snow confronted an invisible killer: the 1854 cholera outbreak in London. Most physicians blamed “miasma” or foul air. Snow suspected the water.

By mapping deaths around a single pump on Broad Street, he showed that nearly all victims used the same source. When the pump handle was removed, the outbreak subsided.

Snow’s systematic approach to data collection and analysis pioneered modern epidemiological methods. His findings drove sanitation reform and helped lay the groundwork for germ theory. The idea that data and design could stop disease reshaped medicine itself.

Snow’s legacy highlights the crucial importance of improved water and sanitation infrastructure for public health. In fact, a 2023 World Health Organization study estimated that 1.4 million deaths could be prevented each year through improved access to safely managed water, sanitation, and hygiene services.

Richard Doll and the Fight Against Smoking

A century later, another British physician turned prevention toward chronic disease. Sir Richard Doll helped reveal the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, one of the most important discoveries in modern medicine.

In 1950, Doll and Austin Bradford Hill published a landmark case-control study showing a strong association between smoking and lung cancer. Four years later, their prospective study of over 40,000 British doctors confirmed that smokers had far higher death rates from lung cancer and heart disease than nonsmokers.

The findings were undeniable. Smoking was deadly. Over decades, Doll followed these physicians, eventually showing that half of all persistent smokers (those who smoked cigarettes exclusively and continuously from early adult life until at least old age) die from their habit, but quitting by age 30 avoids almost all of the risk.

His research spurred warning labels, ad bans, and public smoking restrictions. The 1964 U.S. Surgeon General’s Report, built on Doll’s evidence, helped drive smoking rates from 42 percent of American adults in 1965 to about 12 percent in 2022.

A recently published analysis by the World Health Organization suggests that, between 2025 to 2030, targeted interventions or what they labeled “best buys” for decreasing tobacco use will have a 7:1 return on investment. These actions include taxes, graphic warnings, advertising bans, smoke-free policies, mass media campaigns, and cessation services. For every dollar invested in these best buys, there is a return of 7 dollars in lives saved, disability-adjusted life years averted, and productivity gain.

Doll’s work, like Snow’s, Franklin’s and Peel’s, showed that the greatest success is in preventing the occurrence of the disease, the fire, or the crime.

One Ounce, Many Dividends

Franklin, Peel, Snow, and Doll lived in different centuries and faced different dangers. Yet their message was the same. Prevention saves lives, health, and money.

Prevention is foresight in action, imagining harm before it happens and building systems to stop it. In an age of climate disasters, rising violence, and chronic disease, this fact matters more than ever. The next great leap in public health won’t come from new technology alone but from a timeless truth – an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.