The Formula for Better Health: How to Save Millions of Lives--Including Your Own

The formula to stop invisible killers—an approach that can protect your health and prevent the next pandemic—from one of the most influential public health leaders in the US.

Gold Medal, 2025 Foreword INDIES Awards, Health (Adult Nonfiction) Category

In The Formula for Better Health, Tom Frieden—named “the most influential leader in American public health since C. Everett Koop” by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg—reveals how to defeat the world’s deadliest diseases.

Drawing from decades leading New York City’s health department after 9/11, directing the CDC during the Ebola epidemic, and fighting tuberculosis and other lethal threats in India and around the world, Frieden combines compelling stories with insider knowledge to show you how to win the battle for health.

In this book, you will 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 also 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, and why we ignore urgent medical warnings. Most importantly, you’ll find out how to stop today’s leading killers.

Using critical insights from real-world successes and failures, The Formula for Better Health bridges the lethal gap between scientific knowledge and life-saving action. Whether you want to protect your own health, safeguard your community, or solve seemingly impossible health challenges—or all three—this book offers realistic hope and a clear path to a healthier future.

Dr. Tom Frieden helped stop deadly outbreaks in New York City, directed the CDC under President Obama while leading the agency’s response to Ebola and other threats, and is now CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, a global organization that partners with countries to prevent millions of deaths.