Iowa Governor's Conference on Public Health

Last week was busy. In addition to the building dedication on Friday, many of the CBH students attended the Iowa Governor's Conference on Public Health in Ames on Tuesday and Wednesday. I generally enjoy professional conferences. It's great to get outside of the university and see a wide variety of professionals from all corners of the state in various different professions related to public health. Part of my enjoyment probably comes from the fact that I just love talking to people about anything and everything (a characteristic my dad seems to have as well).

I went to many different sessions and tweeted from the event (you can scroll down my timeline and read the tweets with #iagovcph if you're interested). But one particular story has stuck with me for the past week. It was during a session with Dr. Richard Jackson, on environmental policy and health. Dr. Jackson told a story about a time he was driving in Atlanta (forgive me if I don't remember all the details). There was an old, hunched over, lady walking with a heavy grocery bag along the side of a busy highway. This highway only had pedestrian crosswalks every 2 miles. Dr. Jackson said he thought about her and how if she died the death would be attributed to heatstroke or a traffic accident. It wouldn't be attributed to a lack of public transportation, a lack of pedestrian crosswalks, or the accessibility of a grocery store to those without cars.

I'm not sure why this story has stuck with me so strongly. It's a powerful reminder of all the ways public health affects our lives as well as an unfortunate oversight in our system for determining immediate causes of death instead of environmental issues leading to that cause. I had been thinking about this on Sunday as I drove home from work and strangely enough I turned on IPTV that night to find a 4-hour series by Richard Jackson called "Designing Healthy Communities." I was only able to watch 1 hour of it as I had to do homework, but I would definitely like to see all the episodes at some time.

And again, I must get back to the final exam studying and paper writing waiting for me in the last two weeks of the semester!