Transcript of
2003 Virginia S. DeHaan Lecture on Health Promotion and Education:
DeHaan Lecture Welcome and Introduction of Dearell Neimeyer:
James Curran, PhD, Dean, Rollins School of Public Health
Hi everybody. Welcome to, to one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen, fourteenth annual. I’m quantitatively impaired. Fourteenth annual DeHaan lecture. I, this is always a really special time of year and this is my ninth annual DeHaan lecture here at the Rollins School of Public Health. Many of you are here from our school or you’re our friends and neighbors and you’re in the Rita Anne Rollins Room and that’s Rita Anne Rollins who died at a very young age in the Rollins family, in the Rollins School of Public Health. I was I’ve been given all sorts of promptings on how to behave at these sessions. Everybody thinks they’ll give me messages and then they’ll say he never follows those anyway. It’s even so bad now that Bob DeHaan is telling me how to behave. And so I must be really bad because this is the ninth year in a row I’ve been with Bob DeHaan. This is a special lecture for a number of reasons. It’s a special lecture because it honors Ginny DeHaan, one of our alumni, Bob’s first wife, and we’re very happy to have Bob and Mary Anne S. DeHaan here with us today. It’s special because she was also a faculty member in our department of behavioral science and health education and was a health education graduate and health education teacher. And so this has often had the theme of health education in public health. If you look at the past speakers, I think though that you would say that past speakers have really the most in common is their leadership ability and I tried to figure out what they had in common. When you look at the past speakers you see three people who had theories named after them in health education, you have one former surgeon general, you have a couple people who have written textbooks in health education, two people who’ve had the misfortune and crime of becoming school of public health deans, one person who won a Peabody, Pulitzer, and Polk award for her journalism, one person who’s the current head of the American Cancer Society, but what they all have in common is their uncommon leadership in public health and I can remember after I was Dean for about three years asking a group of students who were the people who had, who won the leadership award in 1998 in public health? Who were the most important people in public health that year? It was meant to be a trick question and I reminded the students that public health is what we as a society do to assure health. It’s not what we as doctors do, it’s not what we as nurses do, it’s not what we as biostatisticians do, and it’s not what we as health educators do, but we as a society do. And the most important hero of that year are the people who have the greatest impact and lo and behold they were lawyers and attorneys generals and we are fortunate to have the biggest hero of all with us today, Hubert Humphrey the third. They made the biggest difference because they directly made the assault that was effectively done on the greatest cause of death in the Western World, the greatest preventable cause of death, cigarette smoking. And they single handedly, with the help of a few friends changed the rules and it’s never been the same ever since. In the United States we have the lowest smoking rates in the developed world despite having a very decentralized form of government and a federal government which is somewhat powerless relative to other countries in terms of its domestic work and we did it because of the strength of the community and the state-based work of people who redefined the unacceptable, who said, we just cannot have this many deaths due to smoking in our country, we’re going to change that, it’s not right, we know the methods to do it, and they did it. So Hubert Humphrey the third runs to the top of our previous lecturers as our public health hero this year. The third reason I’m so happy to be here is that it brings together people from the Atlanta community; alumni, friends, faculty, students from our school, people from CDC, American Cancer Society, Atlanta University, and others to join in celebration of the speaker and a little bit of wine and cheese afterwards and the wish that I could sit down sooner. It’s really nice to have Skip Humphrey here because of what the legacy of his family has meant to our country and school even before he became a public health hero in 1998 and that was with his father Hubert Humphrey who was a political hero of mine when I first started to vote in those days and is recognized as a hero by the program started by Jimmy Carter of the Hubert Humphrey’s Fellows Program and of course it worked out just about right for us to walk downstairs and see the pictures on the wall of the now over one hundred Fellows from probably 75 countries and they have one from Kenya sitting in Dr. Brachman’s office who said, “Oh yes, thank you.” Thank you those to our school, to family. Now I want to mention something about Bob DeHaan and telling precisely what he’s doing now. The last few years I’ve gotten his job wrong each time. Bob DeHaan is now Director of the Committee in Undergraduate Science Education in the Center for Education in the Division of Behavioral Social Sciences in the National Academy of Sciences, Five Hundred Fifth Street Northwest. His email address is available on the website. I’m only teasing Bob because Bob, Skip is also a hero in many of our minds. He’s a guy who has turned his life to community service after a very strong life in science and teaching at Emory as chairman of basic science departments here. In the last ten years he’s turned to elementary school and middle school education and after starting some model programs here at Emory he’s been asked to help the National Academy of Sciences do that to talk about the next generation and next generation and next generation of students in science so thanks Bob for what you do and thanks for this lecture. Now what I get to do is invite Dearell Neimeyer, who is the Executive Director of Arts of Tobacco Technical Assistance Corporation to the podium to introduce Mr. Humphrey.
Opening comments from Dearell Neimeyer, MPH and Introduction of Mr. Humphrey:
Dearell Neimeyer, MPH, Executive Director, Tobacco Technical Assistance Consortium, RSPH
Well good evening. This is my first of the fourteenth so it’s a real pleasure to be here and it’s a pleasure to have tobacco on the agenda this evening. It’s one that I have been working in for many years so I appreciate the opportunity to have been involved in getting Mr. Humphrey here. I’m going to deviate a little bit from the introduction the normal way, read the bio kind of thing. You have a wonderful description of all the contributions that Mr. Humphrey has made to public health and tobacco, but they need to frame a little bit the issue that Mr. Humphrey will be presenting to you tonight. As the Dean said, not only do I really appreciate Mr. Humphrey’s coming to Emory to talk to us about his role in the tobacco use situation in Minnesota and trying to change that, but his family’s long term commitment. I was going to try to get away with saying I was a young child in the sixties and seventies, but okay, young man, but remember also his father’s contribution to not only health, but social justice in general. And then I had the good fortune to work with a Humphrey Fellow last year from the eastern block states, countries. So it‘s touched me in a couple ways this year. I met Mr. Humphrey in the late 90’s. I was with the Office of Smoking and Health at the CDC and one of the conditions that Mr. Humphrey had fought so hard for in the settlement with the tobacco industry was to set up a foundation in Minnesota that would be a lasting legacy to the prevention and reduction of tobacco use and I had the good fortune to be asked to come up and give some technical assistance at that foundation and I don’t know whether he’ll touch on that foundation much, but if you’ve seen anything in the news the foundation was eventually sued by another attorney general for maybe out stepping their bounds from that lawsuit agreement so in tobacco control you’re never sure what’s going to happen at any one time. Change is the big thing. Why are we so concerned about this issue? Public health, we all use the data, we all know it, 400,000 annual deaths, leading preventable cause of death. Four hundred, get your number right, that number challenged also. Forty six million smokers, if patterns continue to exist today, 6.4 million of our young people will become smokers and will die prematurely from tobacco. 75 million dollars in medical care costs and the industry will spend billions this year to market its product and to influence tobacco control public policy in this country. So those are the numbers. S.O. has been working in tobacco control for about fifteen years now. Sometimes it feels like we’ve gotten numb to the numbers. They’re the facts of life, they’re a reality in which we have to work with and live with. I think in tobacco control we’ve gotten frustrated at times that public health or the healthcare side of business, or businesses themselves, education, politics won’t pay more attention to this issue, won’t look at it and understand it, that maybe we can do more and that we aren’t doing enough and won’t see it as an unsolvable problem, but really it’s a solvable problem. We have the data and we have the experience, we know what to do. There’s a model in public health, the old triangle: the host, vector, and agent. For years we’ve worked on tobacco control from the host perspective, trying to get the user of tobacco control to change their behavior, to do something differently, almost at times we tried to inoculate them with information so they wouldn’t use the product. We did little to look at the vector and the agent which was the tobacco industry and its products and just quote on how dangerous that’s been in the industry documents from the early seventies a quote was discovered that says, “They cost a penny to make, it sells for a dollar, and it’s addictive, that’s what I love about this business.” So the industry had been skating by for many years on this issue, but in the late 1990’s, four attorney generals decided to change that. The states of Minnesota, Florida, Texas, and Mississippi sued the industry for its practices and its harmful products. Three of those states settled out of court, but one state went to the mat. It was bound and determined to hold this industry accountable and that was Minnesota. Out of that experience we have thousands and thousands of pages of documents from the industry documenting their practices and their history that for years can be used to hold this industry accountable. Mr. Humphrey used public health data, used the industry’s own words, to win this case. The industry finally settled out of court. The law and public health have long been partners. They’ve worked hand in hand for years. You only have to look at the health and safety codes of this country to see the fruits of those partnerships, but taking on the likes of the industry like the tobacco manufacturers was truly a benchmark in the history of public health and law. Please welcome Mr. Humphrey to tell us about Minnesota’s role in that historic public health inventive. Mr. Humphrey.
Hubert Humphrey’s Presentation:
Hubert H. Humphrey, III, Senior Vice President, GCI Tunheim
Darryl to you and particularly to those that work in your clinic and the work that you’re doing across this country I know with others, some of whom are mutual good friends in Minnesota I thank you. To Dean Curran thank you so much for the opportunity to be here at your School of Public Health. I will go back to the School of Public Health in Minnesota and tell them that yes, we really should have a building where we can all be together. We're not yet, but we’re getting there. We’ve got to solve a small little budget crisis in Minnesota. Of course nobody has any of those anymore. Right, and most of all though to, to Mr. and Mrs. DeHaan, Dr. DeHaan thank you so much for sponsoring this lecture and being a part of the larger part of what public health is all about. I know we’ve only had a brief opportunity to visit, but I’m going to give you that call. I'd like to learn more about it. I thank you very much for allowing me to be here, it was very special to go downstairs and to see all of the Humphrey Fellows that have been here. I got to tell you, if you’re up there dad and I know you are this is exactly what you wanted. This is exactly what he wanted to see and I thank you for being a part of that. It’s a very, very special thing that we’re able to do. And sometimes you get a little discouraged when you see things are happening around this world and you wonder whether or not things are going in the right direction just think about the wonderful people that have been able to come here to this great university, to this school and to learn and then to be able to go back home and to help people have a better life. It’s a very, very special thing that President Carter has done and I think he's a great hero for that and so many other things as well. Well we got to be careful because you’ve got a Humphrey in front of you and I remember the old adage that someone used to say at a couple of political events, “Here comes Humphrey when do they serve breakfast.” So we have to be a little bit careful, but I want to thank you first of all also, just a little bit humorously, I look out here and I see this magnificent green forestry that you have all over here. It's nice to be away from the frozen tundra and it's not exactly frozen anymore, it actually got up into the fifties today, so we're making progress, but we’re kind of far behind you and it’s really nice to be able to be here. I am indeed honored to be here also literally and what I know Dean you have said many times is you’re right at the center of the nation and the world's public health. I know across the street literally is CDC and all wonderful things that are happening there and here and elsewhere. It is something very special and unique that you have here in this great city of Atlanta and I congratulate you on that. Now from what I gather and what I heard just a few moments ago about this lecture series I may be the first attorney and former politician to have been invited. You're very brave to do that folks, very brave. Lawyers and politicians, of course as you know, never have held been held in very high esteem. However of late I guess we have moved up the rung a ladder or two given some of the shenanigans that corporate CEOs and corporate accountants in accounting firms have been dealing with. What I’d really like to do tonight is to explore with you as I do with my students in my seminar class at the school of public health the importance of using our nation's political and judicial process to successfully move forward and reestablish the priority of the public's health. Now I know you’re deep in to it every single day so it's important to you. You’re immersed in it, but unfortunately over the last several years if not decade or two, we have slipped away, we have taken kind of, we just assume that we have good public health. It's taken a few things like tobacco, like SARS, like bioterrorism and the rest to kind of wake us up to the fact that you can’t just let this stuff sit. You have to keep working at it all the time. So I'd like to visit with you a little bit about that special role that I think you do play and I urge you to continue to play. Now as faculty, students, and friends of this school of course you recognize, even though not everyone else does, that health science is truly leading a scientific, a revolution of scientific discovery and investigation and practice. All one has to do is understand just a little bit about genetics, the human genome, pharmaco-genomics or stem cell research and I’ve just recently learned those words and you begin to understand the sweeping changes that are occurring all around us and I think in a not dissimilar way there is a kind of a close revolution happening, that has happened in a sense I saw throughout my life in my political career. I served in our state senate for ten years and then I served as attorney general for some sixteen and of course then I was raised up in a slightly political family. I think we woke up to politics and went to bed with politics going. What was so exciting for me in the politics that I was surrounded with was to be at the center of change and that’s in a sense where you are today. I know you've always kind of been in it, but I’ll tell you, the public is beginning to realize the revolutionary change that is going on and it is our task, and our opportunity to tap into that realization that the public is beginning to have. With your informed understanding of the scientific revolution that is taking place in the health sciences and with your capacity to translate that into public policy you are the key players in an effort to provide for the improved health of the public. Now the challenges are great indeed, we know that, but the opportunity for success is even greater. Now one such challenge is the continuing struggle and I’m so glad Darryl that you mentioned it. Sometimes we get immersed in the statistics and they’re around us so much that we forget about it and we don’t see it all the time on the television, it isn’t there twenty-four hours a day so we don't, we don't understand how devastating this problem of tobacco is.