We have recently seen the federal and state funding that covered the employment of 187 public health workers in Utah curtailed. This is extremely shortsighted. In the last hundred years, the average life expectancy of U.S. citizens has increased by over 25 years. This was accomplished through basic public health measures, such as better water quality, better nutritional food and hygiene, widespread vaccination programs, worker safety, etc.
Certainly enormous progress has been made in medical science, but even here, the greatest impacts in areas of heart disease, strokes and cancer prevention have been public health campaigns to prevent smoking, encourage exercise, control blood pressure, and other inexpensive interventions. Let’s add seat belts and we are almost at our current life expectancy of almost 80 years.
However, in Utah, we are proud to be the first state to remove fluoride from water and try to prevent collective bargaining to protect worker safety and health, as well as firing community health workers.
We are now seeing the reemergence of measles in the unvaccinated. Having worked in refugee camps, I can attest that measles in malnourished unvaccinated children under the age of five was the most preventable cause of death — in some situations killing 30% of the most vulnerable kids. These diseases had almost been eradicated in this country. Now we have appointed health officials who deny the importance of vaccines, who are rewriting history by saying COVID did not really kill anyone, and who are removing experts in the National Institute of Health and regulatory agencies who have devoted their lives to prevention of such diseases.
Public health really is most effective when absolutely nothing happens because preventative strategies work and diseases do not emerge in our community. Our president has referred to those who work for the “poor and underprivileged” as saps, suckers, and those working in other countries as unpatriotic. We now have elected feckless politicians who are curtailing public funding to prevent such diseases in order to curry favor with this president. Instead of firing such workers, we should give them our thanks for their dedication and work over the last 100 years. I hope the current loss of such skilled and dedicated professionals is not permanent.
Please make the effort to become more informed about public health issues. Discuss these issues critically and respectfully with any health professionals you may know. Be careful when you read social media posts from influencers and other paid fiction writers. They are not working in our public interest.
Fred Gottlieb, Holladay
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