Contagious Conversations: Perspectives from Aspen Ideas: Health

The annual Aspen Ideas: Health festival in Aspen, CO, drew health leaders, innovators and advocates to explore today’s approaches to better health for all. At this year’s event, our CDC Foundation President and CEO Dr. Judy Monroe and Pierce Nelson, the Foundation’s vice president for communications, sat down for our latest Contagious Conversations podcast episode with three public health experts to hear their insights on the challenges and opportunities facing public health today.

In this episode, we are joined by Patrick Breysse, PhD, CIH, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, Agency for Toxic Disease Registry at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Marlene Wolfe, PhD, assistant professor of environmental health at Emory University; and Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, chief health officer at Google. 

These speakers share their insights on several timely public health protection topics, including the connection between health and climate change; an innovative wastewater surveillance project that gathers data on COVID-19 prevalence in communities and how that technology may be applied in the future; and the current state of public health as the nation seeks to strengthen its public health system. 

We thank all three of these experts for taking time out of the Aspen Ideas: Health festival to share their unique perspectives about turning ideas into action to improve health. I encourage everyone to listen to this episode and learn more about these unique and important perspectives on the state of public health today.