Thought for Food

Obama picks Frieden to rock our public health world

Via lauraemily, who writes: “SUCH a rockstar.”

Dr. Alfred Sommer, emeritus dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was on the team that recommended Dr. Frieden as New York’s health chief in 2002, recalled interviewing him shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Dr. Frieden had flown to New York from India, where he was living and working on tuberculosis control.

Before he left India, he was asked about his top priority, Dr. Sommer said. “Oh, well, that’s easy, Al,” Dr. Sommer recalled him replying. “Tobacco. Tobacco is killing more people, and that’s my top priority.”

“Tom, I don’t disagree that tobacco is a real scourge, but have you heard of 9/11?” Dr. Sommer said he countered.

“Of course I know about that, but bioterrorists are not going to kill more New Yorkers than tobacco is,” Dr. Frieden said.

For more, see Ezra Klein’s kudos for the new chief of the CDC:

Now that early treatment really makes a difference, he has led the fight to “normalize” H.I.V. testing as a routine part of medical exams, and help get people who are living with HIV/AIDS into early care.  Also having the health department pass out 35 million condoms a year.

In his earlier days as CDC assignee to NYC, he led the fight against multi-drug resistance tuberculosis, which as part of the earlier AIDS epidemic, was spreading, including in the U.S. and potentially among health care workers as well as the general public.

The NY Times does NOT mention some of his other recent activist public health intervention, which I loved, but was controversial for corporate food and some phony libertarians. This is the requirement for restaurants and other food establishment to post the nutritional contents of prepared and served food. Total calories, calories from fat and saturated fats, sugars etc.  Phony libertarians (i.e. corporate shills) protest this as somehow against their freedom.  Progressives, and honest libertarians, point out this is simply a matter for honest information upon which people can then make a truly knowledgeable independent choice.

In addition to tobacco, he gets that the real public health problems in the U.S. are related to our social-economic environment: matters of food and diet, exercise and physical activity, are not solely individual choices. They are very much economic, corporate, government, societal choices. And policy can have an effect.  It will be interesting to see if folks like the new FDA commissioner, and now CDC, and the rest of the Public Health team, can effect food policy and transportation policy, etc.