Author Isabel Wilkerson to keynote this year’s Opening General Session

Wilkerson

"They did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island, they were already citizens. But where they came from they were not treated as such."

Those are words written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson in the best-selling nonfiction book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.” The book — appropriately described as “epic” by many reviewers — chronicles the story of black migration out of the American South, better known in history books as the Great Migration. Wilkerson tells the story of the millions who left in search of better lives through the experiences of three black Americans: a sharecropper who left Mississippi for Chicago; a surgeon who left Louisiana for Los Angeles; and a young man who fled Florida for New York after hearing that his employers were planning to lynch him for organizing fellow citrus pickers in support of better working conditions. All three stories are woven into Wilkerson’s account of the Great Migration and how it shaped our country and communities. 

Wilkerson will talk about her experience putting together the 640-page book during her keynote speech at this year’s Opening General Session in New Orleans. According to Wilkerson’s website, the book is the “story of how the northern cities came to be, of the music and culture that might not have existed had the people not left, the consequences North and South and, most importantly, of the courageous souls who dared to leave everything they knew for the hope of something better.” For public health practitioners, the underlying intersections between the book’s themes and the work of public health are sure to jumpstart some interesting discussions and are undoubtedly relevant to this year’s Annual Meeting theme of “Healthography: How Where You Live Affects Your Health and Well-Being.”

“The Warmth of Other Suns” was named to more than 30 best-of-the-year lists, including those in the New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post. Wilkerson also received the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, among many others. 

At this point, many of you may be thinking about reading the award-winning book before the November Annual Meeting. If that’s the case, why not join the club? “The Warmth of Other Suns” will be the focus of APHA’s first-ever Annual Meeting Book Club, which will gather in New Orleans to discuss the book and how it relates to today’s big public health issues. Sign up to join the Annual Meeting Book Club, which officially kicks off in August, and check back with the Annual Meeting site for upcoming details. Also, consider purchasing your copy of “The Warmth of Other Suns” through AmazonSmile, which will donate a percentage of your purchase to support APHA.

This year’s Opening General Session is Sunday, Nov. 16, from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

P.S. Mark your calendars, public health people! Registration and housing for this year’s APHA Annual Meeting opens June 3!

Wilkerson photo courtesy Joe Henson

Looking back, moving forward as APHA heads to New Orleans

 
Bittersweet. That’s one way to describe getting ready for APHA’s 142nd Annual Meeting & Exposition in New Orleans. Bittersweet because we’re thrilled to bring the world’s largest public health gathering to one of the nation’s most unique, vibrant and resilient cities. At the same time, one can’t help but think about the devastating events that led to this year’s Annual Meeting location.

On Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina barreled through New Orleans, causing the levees to break and the city to flood. For days, images of residents stranded on rooftops and in evacuation centers without food and water dominated the news. It seemed unreal. New Orleans was under water and rescue efforts seemed painfully, unjustly slow. In the wake of one of the worst natural disasters in American history, serious gaps in the country’s emergency response system were utterly exposed for the whole world to see. It was truly and terribly shocking.

The devastation in New Orleans was at the forefront of conversation at APHA headquarters in Washington, D.C. As Association leaders, members and staff discussed how the public health community could help in the aftermath, a big decision also had to be made regarding that year’s Annual Meeting, which was slated to convene in New Orleans in just a couple months. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t enough time. Even though APHA leaders very much wanted to bring the support of thousands of public health workers to New Orleans, city officials said they were unable to accommodate such a large crowd so soon after the disaster. The 2005 Annual Meeting was pushed back to December and would gather in Philadelphia instead.

Now, it is with great pleasure and anticipation that APHA gets ready to bring an estimated 13,000 public health workers, advocates, leaders, researchers, teachers and supporters to New Orleans. APHA conventions staff tells me that the 2014 APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition, which will run Nov. 15-19, is shaping up to be one of the best ever (and, hopefully, one of the few Annual Meetings that doesn’t require attendees to lug around their cumbersome winter coats).

Even though it’s been nearly nine years since Katrina, the storm will surely be the proverbial elephant in the room. And why shouldn’t it be? It takes longer than nine years to rebuild a city, not to mention a community. In August, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center released a report on the city’s progress since Katrina, finding both positive and worrisome results. While the regional economy continues to improve and the city has greatly expanded bike lanes and crime rates are below pre-Katrina levels, serious questions remain about whether all New Orleans residents are benefiting during the recovery.

For instance, the report found that while service-sector employment for women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds has increased, the rate has fallen among men, especially among black men. The number of black men who obtain bachelor’s degrees has not budged since 2000, even though education is consistently linked to lifelong economic security and good health. Also, the New Orleans metro area has experienced double the number of “unhealthy” air quality days when compared to what the report describes as an “aspirational” metro area such as Houston, Texas.

Many of these issues have a direct connection to this year’s Annual Meeting theme of “Healthography: How where you live affects your health and well-being.” In fact, in a city whose landscape and social fabric was forever changed, the notion that “place matters” seems nearly tangible.

At the end of the day, New Orleans isn’t that different from the practice of public health. Both move forward in the face of great challenge and tragedy, both keep going despite people saying it can’t be done, and both are filled with the resilient belief that success is possible.

“This year’s Annual Meeting will be a special one,” said APHA Executive Director Georges Benjamin. “Nine years ago, we watched in disbelief as the waters kept rising. The storm quite literally swept away our collective belief that something like this couldn’t possibly happen here — in our country. Now the question is: What lessons have we learned and are we putting them to use in improving people’s lives and building healthier communities?” 

Visit APHA to learn more about APHA’s 142nd Annual Meeting & Exposition. We can’t wait to see you in the Big Easy!

— K.K.

Above photo courtesy iStockphoto.com/lightphoto

A blast from the past: More offerings from last year’s APHA Annual Meeting

While some of you might still be recovering from last year’s massive public health gathering, your faithful bloggers are back…and with even more news from November’s APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition in Boston.

First, let’s start with the news — literally. The January issue of The Nation’s Health, APHA’s official newspaper, is chock-full of coverage from the 141st Annual Meeting. Whether it’s stories about new research released at the meeting, coverage of newly adopted APHA policies or just lots of photos of public health folks having a good time, it’s all in this month’s special edition. Of course, for those of you who don’t get the nation’s premier public health newspaper at home, you can read all about it online (though you’ll need your APHA member username and password to access some articles.)  

They say you can’t relive the past. But with APHA’s E-ssentialLearning, you kind of can. Audio and PowerPoint presentations from hundreds of last year’s scientific sessions are now available for streaming online. For more on E-ssentialLearning, visit the APHA website.

Wishing you had more photographic souvenirs from the Boston meeting? We’ve got you covered. Hundreds of photos from the 141st Annual Meeting can now be viewed and purchased online at EZ Event Photography. If you’re prompted for a password, enter “publichealth.” Hard copies of photos are available for $7 for 4x6 prints, $10 for 5x7 prints and $15 for 8x10 prints. Electronic versions are also available and can be ordered through the site. More photos from last year’s Annual Meeting are also available on APHA’s Flickr page.

While it’s only January, preparations are already underway for this year’s 142nd Annual Meeting and Exposition in New Orleans, which has a theme of “Healthography: How Where You Live Affects Your Well-Being” and will take place Nov. 15–19. APHA is now accepting abstracts, so don’t miss out on your opportunity to present! Program planners from the Association’s many Sections, Special Primary Interest Groups, Caucuses, Forums and the Student Assembly do the heavy lifting of selecting scientific session offerings, and so abstract submission deadlines vary between Feb. 10–14. For a full list of abstract deadlines and more information, visit the APHA Annual Meeting site.

And as always, we humbly encourage you to subscribe to this very blog to receive automatic updates by email. We have a feeling you’ll be hearing a lot more from us this year.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Above, two of the nearly 400 people who had their photos snapped at APHA's membership booth at last year's Public Health Expo in Boston.

Closing session challenges public health workers to ‘move this nation forward’

As he sat on the panel of speakers at the Closing Session of this year’s APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition, Donald Warne told a story.

Three sisters were walking along the river, when they saw a group of babies in the water. One sister jumped in to save the babies.

One sister said, “We need to teach these babies to swim.”

The third sister kept walking up the river. When the others called to her, she said, “I’m going to find out who’s throwing these babies in the water and I’m going to stop them.”

He paused.

“That’s public health.”

It was a fitting story to help wrap up this year’s Annual Meeting, which ended with a Closing Session about “Improving the Health of Native Peoples” and featured a keynote address by Evan Tlesla Adams, British Columbia’s first Aboriginal Health physician advisor and current deputy provincial health officer for Aboriginal health.

Adams sought to bring to light some of the issues faced by native people in the U.S. and Canada, but also to note that many indigenous people are actually faring quite well.

“I don’t want to tar us,” he said. “We are also very happy, very vibrant people. Only some of us are at risk. Many of us are flourishing.”

As evidence, he pointed to statistics regarding youth suicides among First Nations — or indigenous — people in Canada. In British Columbia, which has 32 languages, 203 tribes and 226,000 indigenous people, almost half of the tribes had no youth suicides from 1992 to 2006.

“We have solved the problem of youth suicide in those places,” he said. But on the other side of the coin, the news is much darker. Ninety percent of the youth suicides that did occur happened in 10 percent of the villages.

Many of the social determinants of indigenous health are the same as they are for the rest of the population — poverty, education, housing — but native people also face issues of self-determination, or the right to participate in decisions about the issues that affect them.

Adams said Canada has made strides in that area, signing partnership agreements that grant more self-determination to native people and bringing them to the table for discussions.

“Nothing about us, without us” has become the rallying cry.

The panel discussion after Adams’ keynote focused on the needs of native people in the United States and became a conversation about how much more progress Canada has made addressing such needs.

For example, Warne, who comes from the Oglala Lakota Tribe of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, noted that tribes rely on block grants for funding. But block grants from the federal government don’t go directly to the tribes; they first go to the states, which distribute the funds.

“Are all states friendly to American Indians? No,” said Warne, who directs the Master of Public Health Program at North Dakota State University.

Pointing to his own experience in South Dakota, he said that the state had historically been happy to count infant deaths in Indian Country in its overall infant mortality statistics to help get more block grant money. But when that money came in, the funds were never distributed to the tribes.

He called the distribution of block grant funds “low-hanging fruit” and an easy way to make sure funds get distributed where they’re needed most.

As always, the Annual Meeting closed on a note of hope.

APHA Executive Director Georges Benjamin, after handing off the gavel to new APHA president Joyce Gaufin, said he hoped attendees — of which the meeting welcomed more than 12,500 — will leave with renewed energy.

“I hope this meeting began a dialogue,” he said. “As the new APHA, I can tell you, we’re very much about science, advocacy and health. As you go home today, I want you to think about all the things we can do as an Association to move this nation forward.”

See you next year in New Orleans!

— C.T.

Above from top to bottom: Closing Session keynote speaker Evan Tlesla Adams; session moderator and new APHA President Joyce Gaufin sits with Adams and fellow panelists Donald Warne, second from right, and D. Kawika Liu of the Consolidated Tribal Health Project; and APHA's Benjamin, left, smiles for the camera alongside Gaufin and outgoing APHA President Adewale Troutman. Photos by Jim Ezell/EZ Event Photography

Photo finish

For your viewing pleasure, just a handful of the many photos from another successful APHA Annual Meeting. To view more photos from the Boston meeting, visit APHA's Flickr page.

Above from top to bottom: The National Public Health Week booth at the Public Health Expo; attendees at Wednesday morning's APHA Caucus Breakfast; Expo visitors at one of the hundreds of poster sessions; attendees at the American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Caucus Social; and snapping photos at APHA's International Health Section booth. Top two photos by Jim Ezell/EZ Event Photography, bottom three by Michele Late, courtesy The Nation's Health

A little birdie told me so: Tweet of the day

On this last day of the 141st APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition, the tweet of the day goes out to @the2x2project, whose organizers wrote: We had a wonderful time at #APHA13. It's hard to leave! Loved connecting with so many people passionate about #publichealth. Keep in touch!

Keep that passion alive! We'll see you next year!

Read all about it!

Stories of your public health work are making it well beyond the walls of this year’s convention center. Reporters from the around the nation — and world — have been covering the research coming out of the 141st APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition and bringing your messages of good health and prevention directly to the masses. Below is just a snapshot of this year’s media coverage. For more news from the Annual Meeting, visit APHA’s Public Health Newswire.

• Gap seen in exposure to smoke on the job, Boston Globe

• Internet can help mums prevent kids' obesity: Study, Times of India

• Talking to Partners About STDs Often Awkward: Survey, Newsday

• Gabriel Scally: A grotesque parody of fairness, BMJ Group Blogs

• Gun Injury Hospitalizations Cost $75k on Average, Becker’s Hospital Review

• On the Table: For loads of fiber, eat more beans, News & Observer

• Tai Chi and Exercise Keep Seniors Upright, Medscape Medical News

• Professor Who Links Nutrition to Birth Defects Honored by the March of Dimes, Sacramento Bee

• Fast food companies still target kids with marketing for unhealthy products, ScienceBlog

• Kanawha health officials present new app, Charleston Daily Mail


The other local food movement

Most Americans know that nutrition impacts their health. But where you live often determines what you eat — and what you know about healthy food.

The “act local” half of APHA’s 141st Annual Meeting and Exposition theme dominated a Wednesday session on nutrition advocacy in rural, urban and diverse socioeconomic communities. According to presenters, the problem isn’t that people don’t want to eat healthy.

It’s that no one’s educating them on how to do it.

“People aren’t going to go on (USDA.gov) before they chow down on Chinese takeout,” said session presenter Michelle Ramos of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “MyPlate and Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate are great. …But people need prior knowledge of food groups to use them.”

Ramos and her colleagues set out to bring healthier diets to East Harlem, a low-income neighborhood with some of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in New York City. The community also has an extremely high density of fast food and take-out restaurants.

Researchers attempted to change attitudes with the Healthy Plate for a Healthy Weight initiative, in which restaurant owners were asked to give instructional, bilingual plates — inscribed with nutritional guidelines — to each customer. While many customers didn’t use the plate, 75 percent of those who did reported eating smaller portions, while 100 percent reported eating more vegetables.

A second part of the initiative, called Save Half For Later, called upon restaurant servers to ask customers: “Would you like to save half your meal for later?” If customers answered yes, servers would wrap half the selection in a to-go box.

Across the country, presenters from the University of Iowa sought to promote nutrition through local media. According to researchers, 86 percent of rural adult Iowans read a local newspaper every week.

“To influence rural newspapers to include a great number of, and more, accurate stories about healthy eating, it is essential to understand the perspectives of editors,” said Faryle Nothwehr of the University of Iowa College of Public Health.

The school’s case studies found that 100 percent of editors thought readers were interested in healthy eating topics, but only 43 percent felt encouraged by readers to include nutrition-related stories. Nothwehr said that editors found difficulty “localizing” nutrition stories without a human interest angle.

Prince George’s County “has it all in terms of people,” said presenter Diane Hill Taylor of the Prince George's County Health Department in Maryland. With a mix of affluent and low-income areas, the department has to share information in equally varied ways. But before receiving a Community Transformation Grant from the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention, the task proved difficult.

“People knew their grandma’s health department, but it was important to let (county) residents know we’re a new health department,” said presenter Stephanie Cook McDaniel, also with the Prince George's County Health Department. “Our residents were far more tech savvy than we were, so our leadership said we’ve got to get better.”

Through its grant, the department renovated with a dramatic social media push, including roughly 250,000 messages disseminated to its residents every Friday. Free flu shots and “Take Your Loved One to a Doctor Day” communications are changing attitudes in every pocket of the county, McDaniel said.

“By the time our (grant) ends in September 2014, we’ll just be hitting our stride,” she said.

— D.G.

Above, researchers from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine partnered with the Communities Impact Diabetes Center on a food initiative called Save Half For Later. In East Harlem, restaurant servers ask customers if they would like to save and box half of their order for a later meal. Video courtesy Communities Impact Diabetes Center