American Public Health Association

Dr. Georges C. Benjamin is a well-known health policy leader, practitioner, and administrator.

He currently serves as the executive director of the American Public Health Association, the nation's oldest and largest organization of public health professionals.

He is also a former secretary of health for the state of Maryland.

Dr. Benjamin is a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois College of Medicine.

But give us an idea of what it is like.

What are some of the things that you're focused on and working on throughout the year?

Yeah, you know, American Public Health Association has been around for over 150 years.

We are really the history of public health in the United States.

I have been strongly tempted to write an additional chapter upon venereal diseases, but have refrained from treating this unsavory topic.

I may, however, be permitted to quote here from the concluding paragraph of my Lohm Prize essay upon disinfection and personal prophylaxis against infectious diseases, published by the American Public Health Association in eighteen eighty-six.

Quote, "This chapter may be greatly extended, but having passed in review the principal measures of individual prophylaxis against those infectious diseases which are most fatal, we shall not dwell upon precautions to be taken in other contagious diseases.

These precautions will not differ from those already recommended in the cases of smallpox and scarlet fever.

Disinfection The object of disinfection is to prevent the extension of infectious diseases by destroying the specific infectious agent, germ, which gives rise to them.

This is accomplished by the use of disinfectants.

The writer, as chairman of the Committee on Disinfectants of the American Public Health Association in 1885, defined a disinfectant as, quote, an agent capable of destroying the infecting power of infectious material, unquote.

In the preliminary report of this committee, the following general statements with reference to disinfection and disinfectants are also made.

Now, these moves.

have been opposed by the American Public Health Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, among others, but wildly supported, actually, by the polio, measles, and human papillomaviruses, again, among many, many

others.

The viruses themselves are in support of this anti-vax.

So this is not a lucrative constituent like the Harvard Business School.

And so at that school, taking on that job, I had the enthusiasm to want to do some really interesting communications to make the alumni feel really good about the school when they went, so many of them, to the annual meeting of the American Association of Public Health.

And so for the first time, rather than having a card table with some brochures, I commissioned a designer artist to do a splay that had a slideshow going in it that had places to sit in the convention floor with all the other vendors.

And it became popular.

So when you seed some doubt, what we're seeing in the survey data is you do get some changes, some increasing reservations, not very large numbers, but enough to be concerned, for example, in the area of measles, where very small numbers can make real differences in community, even though confidence overall remains high.

From the American Public Health Association, I'm Sophia Medder, and this is the Nation's Health Podcast.

Vaccination is widely considered one of the greatest public health achievements in modern history.

Thanks to scientists and the public health workforce, vaccines have dramatically increased life expectancy, brought us closer to eliminating deadly diseases, and saved millions of lives.

He was successful there, and after that, he made a lot of trips over to Geneva and the World Health Organization.

So he was a consultant to the Public Health Service, um, other international organizations, and he also became-- I think he was the president of the American Public Health Association at some point.

So all these positions enabled him to have a very wide reach in terms of how he became an international globe-trotting consultant in terms of water and sanitary engineering.

Speaking to his work around the world, these middle decades of the twentieth century were a time in this sort of work that, especially looking back on things, were somewhat fraught in terms of how people approached international development work.

He shows that, you know, by working not just at the local and what we call now the global, but in-- the in-betweens as well can be really important and really effective.

So that's kind of another intangible thing.

He was one of the first non-MDs to be president of the American Public Health Association.

He wasn't the first, but he was one of the first.

At the time, the most common illness that was spread through shellfish was typhoid, which is caused by salmonella typhi.

In 1909, the American Public Health Association started working on a way to test the water to try to make sure that shellfish growing in it would be safe to eat.

Eventually s- people started testing the water for E. coli contamination, since E. coli and salmonella are both spread through feces.

The US continued to pass new laws on food safety in response to public concerns, including authorizing the FDA to set standards for quality and fill for canned foods, with the exception of canned milk and meat in 1930.

And to the extent that someone's going to listen to Donald Trump, I have a theory of the case that doctors aren't.

I mean, I noted how many doctors I saw show up on my feeds, but how many organizations of doctors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, family physicians, American Public Health Association.

Everyone came out and said, yeah, this is crazy.

Don't do this.