Public Health

HARRISBURG - Gov. Corbett's top health adviser said Friday that he wanted to make Pennsylvania the first state to create a registry to track illnesses in communities near the Marcellus Shale natural gas formation to determine what effect, if any, heavy drilling has on public health. Health Secretary Eli Avila told Corbett's Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission that creating such a registry is the timeliest and most important step the Department of Health could take, and that his agency is not aware of anything like it in other drilling states.

Philadelphia's first School of Public Health begins classes today, though students will be encouraged to get their education in the city rather than in the classroom. The focus of the Allegheny University program will be on the underlying health problems in the region. The new department wants its students to understand how cultural differences and socioeconomic status affect medical care. "Our students won't sit in a classroom learning about biostatistics and epidemiology, which are the traditional areas of public health," said William Welton, the dean of the school.

Can we be tweeted to better health? Will a widget help slow the spread of swine flu? Do Facebook groups improve the chances of sticking with an exercise or weight-loss regimen? Yesterday, a group of about 45 public-health practitioners explored how social-networking media such as MySpace and Twitter can be used to advance health. The session was one of several "learning institutes" held at the Convention Center in advance of the American Public Health Association's 137th annual meeting in Philadelphia this week.

Is it even possible to imagine how many thousands, or millions, of people are alive today because of the groundbreaking, courageous work of epidemiologist Jonathan Mann? Dr. Mann - who, with his equally accomplished wife, Mary Lou Clements-Mann, was among the victims of Wednesday night's fatal Swissair Flight 111 crash - was a vital warrior in the global fight against AIDS and a profound thinker on the future of public health. He had only begun to bring that vision to bear in our community, when he left Harvard University nine months ago to become dean of the new and struggling School of Public Health at Allegheny University of the Health Sciences.

What is public health? Well, it's the health of the public. And its practitioners include engineers (designing water-treatment plants), nutritionists (developing healthy diets), even politicians (passing laws on bioterrorism and insurance). And bloggers. In "The Public's Health" ( www.philly.com/publichealth ), their new blog, Michael Yudell and Jonathan Purtle are on a mission to help us understand why we as a nation or a city or a neighborhood are ailing or not - and to begin a dialogue with readers on what can be done about it. "I'd like to hear creative ideas and solutions to some of the challenges we face," says Yudell, an associate professor at the Drexel University School of Public Health.

Anita Batman says she takes patients with her when she attends meetings as the mid-Atlantic region's top public health official. Not literally, of course. But memories of them. There's the 12-year-old prostitute whose first three babies were delivered by Batman, who worked for years as a Mississippi country doctor. There's the mentally retarded girl who was molested by her father. There's the mother and daughter whose legs were severely injured by the woman's husband. She has happier memories, too, such as the premature baby who thrived and came to think of the "M.D.

A year after a Johns Hopkins University study found Delaware County's public-health system lacking in leadership and coordination, the county has been slow to implement many of the study's recommendations. County officials said Thursday that they are trying to remedy that soon by hiring a senior medical adviser to help coordinate public-health efforts. They have spent the last year, they said, planning how best to address the shortfalls highlighted in the study done by Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Kristine M. Gebbie got no laughs with her punch line: "Seen any public health lately?" She wasn't talking about health workers mobilizing around an act of terrorism such as 9/11 or an outbreak of hepatitis A, as happened in Beaver County, Pa., last fall. The public-health establishment does catastrophe pretty well, Gebbie, director of the Center for Health Policy at Columbia University School of Nursing, told students and others Thursday at a lecture at Drexel University's School of Public Health.

President Bush had soothing words Thursday night for frightened fellow Americans: They should just "go about their lives. " Sage advice. But damnably difficult to follow in light of new cases of anthrax infection in Florida and New York - seemingly aimed at media outlets. The new anthrax cases, while still small in number, have raised fear levels exponentially. Whereas initially it was possible to assume that only one newspaper building in Boca Raton had been targeted, it is now too easy to imagine powdery envelopes by the dozens if not hundreds heading to an infinite number of target sites selected by an unknown but malevolent enemy.

Dear Joyce: I have a master's degree in public health acquired before I raised a family. I am thinking about updating my skills with additional courses, or even acquiring a doctorate. What's on the horizon for epidemiology? Public health practitioners work chiefly for government agencies - federal, state and local - and for non-profit organizations. They are the health troops who fight to keep disease from overwhelming a community or nation. For those with a scientific bent and an inclination to protect people, the public health field is attractive - more than a quarter-million people in the primary work force find it so, and 20 percent of these have graduate training.