Contagious Conversations / Episode 47. A Look Back at 2023's Most Contagious Conversations
Transcript
Claire Stinson: Hello, and welcome to Contagious Conversations. I'm Claire Stinson, host of today's conversation. Every episode, we hear from inspiring leaders and innovators who make the world healthier and safer for us all. Contagious Conversations is brought to you by the CDC Foundation, an independent non-profit that builds partnerships to help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention save and improve more lives.
As we look forward to the year ahead, we are taking this opportunity to look back at some of the many highlights from our Contagious Conversations podcast in 2023. This year, we covered topics as diverse as community-based approaches to veteran suicide prevention, training the next generation of public health professionals, and the respiratory triple threat posed by COVID-19, influenza, and RSV. We talked with doctors William Foege and Mark Rosenberg on the groundbreaking vaccination approach that led to the eradication of smallpox in 1980. We spoke with Dr. Mandy Cohen, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about her vision of the agency's role in public health and its direction going forward.
Each year, we try to bring you a wide range of voices in public health and keep you informed on public health threats, challenges and successes. Thank you to all of our guests and thank you, our listeners. So, here are just a few of the highlights from 2023.
In one of our first episodes of 2023, we were joined by Dr. Bill Foege and Dr. Mark Rosenberg. A former director of CDC, Dr. Foege is a renowned physician and epidemiologist well-known for his contributions to the eradication of smallpox in the late 1970s. Dr. Rosenberg served as both founding director of CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and as a US Assistant Surgeon General. Through the Center for Global Health Innovation, Doctors Foege and Rosenberg co-developed a project called Becoming Better Ancestors: Nine Lessons to Change the World, dedicated to solving global health concerns and creating positive change for future generations. During this engaging conversation, Dr. Foege shared with us his inspirations for the project and what drove him to dedicate so much of his life to furthering public health.
Dr. William Foege: So when I think of becoming a good ancestor, what I see in my mind are faces of children 300 years from now trying to get my attention because they've given me their proxy, and they're pleading, ‘Please make the best decisions you can for us.’ It's easy for us to make a good decision for ourselves and for our family, for our loved ones, but it's very difficult … time and space put us in a difficult position to make good decisions for a child 300 years from now, but that's what we have to think of, that we have their proxy. We have so much power because of that proxy, but we have to use it well.
Claire Stinson: This year, Americans face the triple threat of COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. We were joined by Dr. Laura Evans, a professor in the division of Pulmonary Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at the University of Washington. Dr. Evans shared with us her thoughts on how to stay healthy and the importance of vaccines in the fight against these and other respiratory threats.
Dr. Laura Evans: On an average year, probably somewhere in this range of 30,000 or so people die from influenza. I think that there's an argument here to say, yes, we need very strong vaccination campaigns. It's not just about me reducing my personal risk, but also that if I get the influenza vaccine, I may reduce the risk to the people around me who may be more vulnerable than me, so I think there is a group protection mentality for that.
Claire Stinson: We'll be right back with podcast highlights from 2023.
Through its Contagious Conversations podcast, the CDC Foundation brings you compelling conversations with health professionals and leaders on a broad range of public health topics to help you stay informed and healthy. You can hear all of the episodes in their entirety at CDCfoundation.org/conversations.
Now back to our highlights of the 2023 season of Contagious Conversations.
April was National Minority Health Month. For that episode, CDC Foundation President and CEO Dr. Judy Monroe spoke with Dr. Melody McCloud, founder and medical director of Atlanta Women's Healthcare PC, and author of the book, Black Women's Wellness: Your "I've Got This!" Guide to Health, Sex & Phenomenal Living. An obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. McCloud shared her insight into the health threats most common to women and the particular challenges faced by Black women.
Dr. Melody McCloud: I've found that the most significant physical threats to women in general and particularly minority women are what I call medicine's top five affecting our lives: heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancers, maternal mortality and HIV/AIDS. So that's really the top five really, pretty much for everybody. When it comes to Black women in particular, there's a statistic that not many people realize is happening, and that is the CDC reports, as NIH and others, that the sixth leading cause of death for Blacks is homicide.
That's a little known statistic. So ironically for Blacks, homicide is listed as number six, when it's not listed at all for any other demographic, so that's the first part. With regard to other issues, I find that as an OB/GYN and taking care of women from all walks of life–Black, white, Hispanic, other–we're all normal. We all start out the same. But for some reason, the data changes for Black women, and that concerns me.
Claire Stinson: Making headlines in 2023 was news of a multi-state outbreak of a drug-resistant strain of pseudomonas aeruginosa, caused it was determined, by contaminated eyedrops. We were joined by Dr. Danielle Rankin, an epidemiologist for the Antimicrobial Resistance Team in the Division of Healthcare Quality and Promotion at CDC to discuss her role investigating that outbreak, one of more than 60 domestic infectious disease outbreaks Dr. Rankin had investigated in her career. In that episode, Dr. Rankin detailed how investigators zeroed in on the cause of the outbreak.
Dr. Danielle Rankin: The fact that we were actually seeing this rare strain across the United States in different body site that the bacteria was identified in different settings, this led us to working closely with the HAI/AR programs to better understand the different exposure data that we had for this investigation. So once we had this information, we were able to really focus on the methods to specifically identify common products, and in this case the eyedrops, across healthcare facility clusters in sporadic cases.
Claire Stinson: On July 10th, Dr. Mandy Cohen was sworn in as the 20th Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As she transitioned into her new role, Dr. Cohen spoke with Dr. Judy Monroe for the September episode of Contagious Conversations. The two discussed a wide range of topics, from the current status of COVID-19 as a public health threat to the challenges created by the current polarized political environment in the United States. Here is a bit of what Dr. Cohen shared about the experience she brought with her to CDC and her priorities for CDC going forward.
Dr. Mandy Cohen: One of the lessons learned for me is relationships are foundational. We're all humans at the end of the day, and making sure that we can find common ground, even if we don't agree on everything, that we can sit together and have respectful dialogue. I think so much of building trust is showing up. It's just showing up and building those relationships. Given CDC's critical importance in protecting health for this country, we really need to focus on a number of things, and foundationally, I believe that we can only change and improve health if we find that foundationally, we have trust. I know we're going to get into this more, but we know there's been some erosion of trust not just in the CDC, but in government, in science, in media recently. So, there's work to do to rebuild trust, so that is first and foremost at the top of my mind.
Claire Stinson: In the last of our guest podcasts this year, we were joined in November by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and Dr. Jerome Adams. Dr. Emanuel, Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and the Levy University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Adams, Executive Director of Purdue University's Health Equity Initiatives and a former U.S. Surgeon General, discussed the topic of hypertension in America, which poses a serious health risk to nearly half of U.S. adults. During that episode, Dr. Adams highlighted some of the ethnic inequities in diagnosing and controlling the silent killer.
Dr. Jerome Adams: Among Black adults, 41.5% had their blood pressure controlled, compared with 48.2% of white adults in the years 2015 to 2018. When taking anti-hypertensive medication, 55% of Black adults had their BP controlled, compared to 60% of Asian Americans and almost 70% of white adults. So we're seeing some incredible racial and ethnic inequities, and this steamrolls into the sequelae of uncontrolled hypertension. It steamrolls into kidney disease and cardiovascular disease, strokes and heart attacks.
You ask, ‘What are the challenges?’ Well, we know they're myriad. We know it's harder for certain populations to get their hypertension diagnosed. Once it's diagnosed, we know it's harder for them to actually get treatment. We know the insurance rate is much lower for people of color, so that limits their ability to access healthcare providers and to actually get their medications and to continue to adhere to their medications, so medication adherence is a big deal.
Claire Stinson: Thank you to everyone who joined us for the podcast this year, and thanks for listening to Contagious Conversations produced by the CDC Foundation, and available wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to visit cdcfoundation.org/conversations for show notes, and if you like what you just heard, please pass it along to your colleagues and friends, rate the show, leave a review and tell others. It helps us get the word out.
Thanks again for tuning in and we wish you all a happy, healthy New Year.
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