Kanawha health officer marks five years
By Marcus Constantino, Charleston Daily Mail, W.Va. | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
The challenges have been immense, but Dr. Gupta welcomes them.
"The things that get me going are the interesting problems," he said. "The more difficult the problem is, the more I like to tackle it. It's just nature."
Gupta started his tenure in
Gupta has been thrust into the spotlight recently as the
"I think that goes back to his ability to look at the whole situation, find out the facts, and try to talk to people on their level," Kanawha-Charleston President
Dr. Gupta was the first to admit we don't know what we're dealing with. This has not happened before and no one really knows what to do here. But I think he really listened to the people's concerns."
Gupta first became involved in public health while studying for his Doctor of Medicine degree at
"There was sort of a breadth, width and depth of public health that was sort of ingrained in me as part of what I did," Gupta said.
After earning his degree in 1994 and completing specialized training on pulmonary medicine, Gupta moved to
"I've always done that, taken time out to volunteer, because it does give you a view into the real life, which is real people suffering real illnesses," Gupta said.
Gupta's wife wanted a warmer place to live, so Gupta, his wife and kids moved to rural
"How you work is you network," Gupta said, explaining that pharmacists, doctors and nurses work together to find out the source of an outbreak of an illness.
He also learned a grim reality about public health: there are often disconnects between public policy and the residents the policies are meant to protect.
"What was happening on the ground was I was seeing a lot of our senior folks having to choose between their medication costs and their food," Gupta said. "Medical school, wherever you are, doesn't teach you a whole lot about health systems. It doesn't teach you a whole lot about public health, generally speaking."
Gupta pursued his passion of public health in 2004 when he became an assistant professor at the
"I had two little kids and it was tough," Gupta said.
He moved to
He found out about the opening for the top job at
"I think it was his passion, the fact that he really wanted to do this," she said. "He actually took a small pay cut to come work with us because he really wanted to be on the local level doing public health.
"Because he had been a physician in private practice, he didn't see things from the ivory tower perspective. He actually knew what it was like to work with low income people and middle income people, and he saw things from the practical perspective," Isaacs said.
Within a week on the job, a child died of the flu, and the next month, the H1N1 flu pandemic spread across the nation. Gupta and his colleagues went to work and formed the
"There weren't a lot of protocols. There weren't a lot of written things you could just follow a particular procedure. You had to come up with stuff, and I think that's where this particular agency excels," Gupta said. "They came up with things, and as a result, we were able to process 250 people an hour in our clinics with shots."
The school immunization program was such a great success, Gupta wanted to continue it after the H1N1 pandemic. The problem? H1N1 vaccines were free, but regular vaccines would cost money and the school immunization program had no funding.
Rather than absorb the costs of buying the flu shots, the health department bills each student's insurance provider.
The idea makes sense, Gupta said, because if the health department buys a flu shot for someone who has insurance, "we are only subsidizing insurance companies and taking away money from taxpayers."
Letters are sent home with schoolchildren, and parents can voluntarily write down their health insurance information so their child can be given the flu shot in an annual in-school flu immunization clinic.
Gupta said 90 percent of parents provide their information.
In 2011, the health department billed health insurance companies for 6,942 flu vaccines and received
Year-after-year, the surpluses are enough to cover immunizations for children not covered by health insurance.
"Kids are the ones that transmit bugs, and the grandparents are the ones that get sick and are at risk of dying in a hospital," Gupta said. "If we can stop that transmission at the kid level, we can keep elderly people from having complications like the flu."
Gupta said there has been a 37 percent reduction in heart attack cases at local hospitals since the smoking ban was enacted.
Gupta has also overseen the combination of the
"To me, it is a moral imperative that we do conduct long-term monitoring in our population," Gupta said. "There is no excuse for not doing it.
"The question becomes if we don't invest in this population surveillance and medical monitoring, if there is even a small, remote chance that people could get sick in the future, that could be a much more expensive proposition because we could have prevented that from happening," Gupta said.
"That's the moral imperative we all face. Some people are willing to live with it. People like me are not."
Gupta criticized the lack of new scientific data produced in the nine weeks since the chemical spill, and said he will find funding for long-term medical monitoring however he can.
"This is so historic and unprecedented in the history of this nation, you have to wonder if there isn't a better way to do this type of work," Gupta said. "It's gotten me a lot of thought as to, 'is the best we can do?' A lot of times I think if this happened in any other country, and it was a chemical exposure of some kind, wouldn't we be calling them and saying 'Hey, you need to do something to protect your people.' I think we would be the first ones to do that as a nation, to call on the other country to fix their issues."
There are countless other chemical tanks along other waterways in the country. Gupta worries that a bad precedent is being set here.
"History will be written, and it's up to people and those who have the power to make decisions (about) which side of history they want to be on," he said.
Gupta says he understands the health department may not get the "Cadillac plan" from the government when it comes to long-term medical surveillance. He has accepted that, and has devoted resources to finding other funding sources.
"I've got our employees here and some leaders within the agency searching day and night to find those grants, to search them up, to make contacts and apply for them," Gupta said. "We're going to do it. We're not going to give up on the people."
Gupta said he has had a "phenomenal" five years in
As Gupta begins his sixth year in
"My challenge to folks is simple: lead, follow or get out of the way," Gupta said. "We are going to try to make (long-term medical surveillance) happen if others can't or won't or are unable to. There's no disrespect or critique of anybody, it's just that I've got to take care of our people.
"To me it's very simple. I'm in a position that I have taken an oath to do whatever I can to protect the people of this county and
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