When working well, many systems in our society are taken for granted. Mail delivery, reliable streetlights and traffic alerts are systems we don’t often think about.
Public health systems are another example of critical infrastructure.
Preventing an outbreak of illness from the lettuce at Safeway. Keeping the paint at local businesses free of lead to protect kids. Keeping residents in senior living facilities safe by regulating infection prevention standards.
In the last eight months, however, we have seen the dismantling of so many vital public health systems, large and small.
I am a retired family medicine physician with a longstanding interest in public health.
Recently, I have had several conversations with Port Angeles High School graduate Erika Meyer, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
We have, in our careers, seen the effects of poor public health policies nationally and internationally, and we are terrified of what President Trump and Secretary Kennedy are doing to this country’s public health infrastructure.
We need our food and water to be safe from disease-causing germs and toxins. We need childhood immunizations to keep our kids safe from diseases like polio, measles and whooping cough. We need the public to trust the experts who have worked to advance science over decades.
And we need you, our neighbors and friends to speak out.
Talk to people. Encourage them to keep up to date with immunizations. Ask that they call their representatives to demand that RFK be removed.
Because so many lives and jobs are on the line, and America deserves better.
Dr. Elizabeth Christian
Port Angeles