[Nation's health, public health services, or public health]

Health workers in many parts of the world have a problem to successfully translate the term public health into their own languages bearing in mind the precise meaning of the concept. As for Serbia, the issue appeared to be solved 130 years ago, when B. Franklin's well-known sentence "Public health is public wealth" had been initially translated. The phrase used ("narodno zdravlje") was based on the already established German expression Volksgesundheit, but simultaneously in an optimal way reflected the idea of public health in Serbian. The adjective "narodno" has no exact equivalent in English, since it lacks socialistic connotation, as people's, informal one, as folk's, or too official one, as nation's. If any, the last option would still appear as the most adequate. In the recent past, the term public health services has been introduced, but enthusiasm for it fades away since this "innovation" demonstrates a lack of understanding of the whole broadness of the public health approach. Lawmakers in 2005 and 2009 replaced "narodno" with "javno" without consulting the academic community. This is an unfortunate move, because the only opposite of "javno" in Serbian is either "tajno" (secret) or "privatno" (private) and none of them fits well as a meaningful exclusion criterion. The author argues that the introduction of "javno" only serves a retrograde ideological prejudice and that tradition should be respected.