 |
||
| UM SPH Home > News & Events > News Releases |
News ReleaseUM SPH recognizes degree candidates in the class of 2006. May 3, 2006 press release from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. At the April 28, 2006 convocation ceremony held in the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, 271 degree candidates participated from the University of Michigan School of Public Health class of 2006 (and additional mid-year graduates were recognized). Kenneth E. Warner, dean of the school and the Avedis Donabedian Distinguished University Professor of Public Health at the University of Michigan, presided. He delivered an address to students and their families on public health, global health, and the unique experience of the "Disaster Generation." "A major challenge for your generation is to determine how to allocate our truly scarce resources in public health to maximize the health and welfare of the public," Dean Warner told the degree candidates. "I applaud the current generation's growing interest in global health in all its manifestations, and know, with a great deal of confidence, that there are people in this graduating class who will make a difference in this crucial domain of public health, as they will in all areas of public health." >Full text of Dean Warner's address (below). Student remarks and annual awardsA tradition at SPH convocation is for graduating students to address their classmates and guests. Flojaune Griffin, Epidemiology MPH candidate and president of the Public Health Students of African Descent, spoke of what has changed in health practices over the centuries, recalling a day when heroin was sold in pharmacies. She also talked about principles that don't change, encouraging her classmates to remember the priceless lessons they had been taught at UM SPH. "I learned the value in public health is not the health, but the public we serve." Khalifa Al-Khalifa, doctoral and MHSA candidate, presented the 2006 Excellence in Teaching Award to Richard Lichtenstein, professor of health management and policy. He praised the many ways Dr. Lichtenstein connects to students, both at SPH and in the Summer Enrichment Program for undergraduates that he has overseen for two decades. He cited how Lichtenstein reaches out even further, to the public, through many community-based organizations in Detroit and Flint. Martin Philbert, senior associate dean for research, presented the 2006 Excellence in Research Award to David Garabrant, professor of environmental health sciences and epidemiology and director of the Center for Risk Science and Communication. Dr. Garabrant was recognized for the vast range and depth of his research. He has published more than 120 papers on environmental and occupational exposures, disease, and health.
Dean Warner's 2006 convocation addressIt is a pleasure to welcome all of you to the Michigan Theater to celebrate the graduation of the University of Michigan School of Public Health class of 2006. This is the day we rejoice in the achievements of every student who has earned a degree at this most distinguished institution. The class of 2006 lies at the heart of a unique generation. Early in your preparation for your adult lives and your professional careers, you witnessed the first major foreign terrorist attack on mainland America. Less than a year ago, you watched as flood waters breached the levee system surrounding New Orleans and wreaked havoc with the lives and possessions of hundreds of thousands of people. Shortly thereafter, you tuned into news of an earthquake in Pakistan that, thus far, has killed more than 30 times the number of people who lost their lives in the tragic attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And in between – in late December 2004 – the Asian tsunami claimed an inconceivable toll of at least 230,000 people. As we speak, health authorities are planning for a global pandemic of avian flu. Such a pandemic may never occur. But if it does, experts estimate that the death toll will number between 2 and 150 million citizens of the globe. Using the unfortunate new metric of the day, that translates into 700 to 55,000 times as many people as perished on September 11th! My parents' generation has been labeled "The Greatest Generation," for their perseverance through the Great Depression and, especially, their contributions in World War II. People of my age constitute the leading edge of the Baby Boom Generation. We were, as well, the Viet Nam Generation, and, somewhat less consequentially, the generation of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. For people born from the 1960s through the 1970s, there was nothing really momentous to distinguish them – perhaps that's the good news – so we saddled them with the nondescript label, "The X Generation." You, my friends, are members of the Disaster Generation. Please note: I did not say the "disastrous" generation! For you are anything but that. This has enormous implications for the professional careers many of you will lead. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the federal government drastically reordered its public health funding priorities to emphasize disaster preparedness. While preparedness has always been an important public health function, prior to 9/11, funding for it, and professional emphasis on it, was always modest. I suspect that if public health professionals had been surveyed in the year 2000 – a mere six years ago – and asked to identify the top ten public health priorities, disaster preparedness might not have made the list. For the field of public health as a whole, the turnaround in attention to readiness has numerous and profoundly important implications: • An entire new infrastructure of organizations, programs, stockpiles, and the like has emerged. At the national level, we have a new Cabinet-level department, the Department of Homeland Security. Within it are brand-new agencies, like the Transportation Security Administration. • Much closer to home, but the result of exactly the same forces, our School's Office of Public Health Practice is home to the Michigan Center for Public Health Preparedness. Just this week, the center presented an oversubscribed course for Michigan public health professionals on radiological terrorism and radiation emergencies. • Our own students have responded in a highly constructive manner, I'm pleased to report. Many of you in this audience are members of PHAST, the school's Public Health Action Support Team. Born as a student initiative and supported by the Office of Public Health Practice, PHAST has trained 68 students in disaster response. We expect this number to rise to 100 or more by the end of next year. Forty students in the classes of 2006 and 2007 devoted their spring break to working in Katrina-ravaged areas of the Gulf Coast, conducting vital public health fieldwork and learning first-hand about the social, psychosocial, health, economic, and environmental impacts of natural disasters. These efforts are good things. They are intelligent reactions to unfortunate situations, sincere efforts to respond to genuine needs. Yet as my former students know, every beneficial effort such as these comes with an opportunity cost. In this case, in our emphasis on disaster preparedness, we risk diverting attention from other things that matter as much, or maybe even more. From the outset of the resource reallocation toward emergency response, public health professionals across the country were split into two camps. Optimists, in the minority, saw the influx of funds as an opportunity to beef up public health "readiness" more generally – to build the infrastructure of the entire field. The larger, and I think more realistic camp, worried that this new emphasis would distract us from the numerous significant, if not so dramatic, workaday responsibilities of our field. All along, while the dollar signs attached to activities like our Preparedness Center rose, allocations for traditional public health activities fell. A major challenge for your generation is to determine how to allocate our truly scarce resources in public health to maximize the health and welfare of the public. And those dollars are scarce. Consider, for a moment, that our nation spends $2 trillion dollars per year on health care – about $6,500 for every man, woman, and child. What do we spend on public health? Perhaps no more than 2% of that amount, between $100 and $200 per person. Health authorities tell us that more than three-quarters of all deaths in our society are premature and preventable. According to the Institute of Medicine and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, if we want to reduce these unnecessary deaths, and the avoidable illness and disability that plague our citizens' health as well, additional expenditures on health care can contribute to no more than 10% of the solution. In contrast, helping people to alter their health-destructive behaviors could diminish the toll by fully 50%! The remaining 40% could be tamed by improvements in our environment and by greater understanding of, and interventions to address, our human biology. What does public health do? Public health focuses on understanding avoidable sources of disease and death, identifying and analyzing their causes, determining effective and cost-effective interventions, and then working to ensure that those interventions are adopted in society. Consider that of all the fields of health science – medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, allied health, and public health – only one, public health, focuses primarily on preventing disease and death in the community as a whole. What does public health do? • It gives us the science to create vaccines against communicable diseases. It gives us the science to evaluate whether those vaccines work. And it gives us the science, accompanied by the political and organizational savvy, to determine how to get effective vaccines to the people who need them. • Public health protects the foods we eat, the pharmaceuticals we ingest, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. • Public health educates the public about healthy and risky behaviors, and evaluates and promotes policies that are demonstrably effective and cost-effective in addressing those behaviors. • Public health seeks to determine how to organize, fund, and deliver health care services in a manner that meets the needs of both individual citizens and the society as a whole. • Public health pays special attention to the needs of the most economically and socially disenfranchised members of our society. A centerpiece of our agenda is to decrease disparities in health that are particularly obvious across the socioeconomic and racial/ethnic dimensions of society. You, our new graduates, understand the importance of healthy behaviors, of a clean and sustainable environment, of a smoothly functioning health care system. But part of your job will be convincing other members of the "Disaster Generation" that hurricanes and terrorist attacks are not the only disasters that plague our society. Burgeoning rates of obesity and diabetes, asthma, lead poisoning, an epidemic of depression and other forms of mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS, substance abuse, and interpersonal violence…. These are the daily disasters, the ones that in the aggregate afflict far more Americans than hurricanes and terrorists; yet they rarely permeate the consciousness of the American public. And when they do, it is never with the impact of an airplane crashing into a building. The daily disasters are the ones we don't hear collectively because they make no noise. We do not see them collectively, because the quiet, if painful, passing of so many individuals, dispersed throughout the nation, never makes the evening news. We do not fear them, because we believe, often erroneously, that they won't happen to us, that they're other people's problems, often old people. Yet these individual disasters, these personal disasters, in reality constitute the greatest threat to health. With public health now receiving the nation's attention, the class of 2006 can and must be part of a nationwide effort to redirect this attention. This does not mean neglecting readiness; to the contrary, both 9/11 and Katrina have, I hope, taught us important lessons about the critical need to be ready – to be smart and well-resourced when the next such crisis hits us; or, in a best-case scenario, to avert an impending crisis from occurring. Rather, this means that we must convince our national leaders that we need far more invested in effective health education and improving our environment – the mundane but critical work of public health. And those who hold the purse strings must cease considering these to be discretionary expenditures made only after taking care of the "necessary" ones, most notably our military presence around the globe. And speaking of the globe, it needs our help – our public health help – more than ever. We will win far more hearts and minds, we will promote democracy far more effectively, by demonstrating that the richest nation in the world is also the most compassionate and generous, that we care about our neighbors. And what better place to start than health? In fiscal year 2004, the federal government's health assistance to other countries totaled $2.5 billion. That represents a dramatic doubling in just four years, and the total is increasing as we speak, primarily the result of the Bush Administration's admirable five-year $15 billion Global AIDS Initiative. Still, to put the figure in perspective, the 2004 total is only two-thirds the annual budget of the university from which you are graduating this weekend. This is indeed a great university, and it deserves every penny of those resources. But does our country's contribution to the health of the world's impoverished peoples deserve less? Worldwide, 10.8 million children die each year before reaching the age of five. Fully 92% of these children – 10 million – are in low-income countries. Two million of them die from diarrhea! The same number succumb to pneumonia. Another half a million perish as a result of measles, a vaccine-preventable illness. What causes these deaths? In a word, poverty. Half of childhood deaths are attributed to malnutrition. Other causes – all related to poverty – include unsafe water, poor sanitation, exposure to insect disease vectors, and a lack of basic medical and preventive services, including vaccinations. These are all problems that, in concept, have easy solutions. They are not expensive. What they require – but what neither we nor the rest of the developed world has mustered – is a generosity of spirit to resolve them, the organizational capacity to do so, and the political will to make it all happen. When we speak of global health, we cannot ignore the literal health of our globe. I am persuaded that global warming is a reality, a not-so-natural disaster playing out on the stage of social and economic theater. Here, the solutions require the same organizational capacity and political will, but the solutions can be expensive, at least in the near term. But if we fail to deal with this issue, the long-term costs to our children and our children's children will be immense. The enormity of this problem, and the complexity of its resolution, cry out for a combination of well-reasoned and impassioned leadership, leadership that I hope – that I expect – will come in part from the graduates seated before me this evening. I applaud the current generation's growing interest in global health in all its manifestations, and know, with a great deal of confidence, that there are people in this graduating class who will make a difference in this crucial domain of public health, as they will in all areas of public health. That's the School's history. Indeed, today we have graduates making contributions not only in all 50 of the U.S. states, but also in a remarkable 84 countries! What kind of difference will you make? Right now, many of you, probably most, are asking precisely that question. You are wondering what you will do in your careers. Actually, I suspect that many of you are focusing somewhat more narrowly, and nervously, on where you'll get your first job out of grad school! Go ahead and worry if you want to. But let me suggest two things: • Second, while we cannot necessarily say precisely how you will do it, we do know that you will make important contributions to the health of the public. We know this because graduates from past years who sat in the same seats that you are occupying this evening have done so. What have they accomplished? I'll give just a few examples: • One of them is currently the Minister of Health of Mexico, building a national health insurance program to cover the poor citizens of his country. Before that, he was second in command of the World Health Organization. • Another went on from here to become President of the national Blue Cross, Blue Shield Association. • Another is currently Director of the Department of Human Services of the State of Michigan. • Another has spent nearly 25 years as head of the NIH National High Blood Pressure Education Program, a program credited with contributing significantly to the greater than 50% nationwide reduction in deaths from stroke and heart-disease. • Starting with one computer and rented office space, two of our graduates founded a company that is today regarded as the global leader in clinical data services. • And since 1968, the year I graduated from college, one-third of the Presidents of the American Public Health Association have been graduates or faculty of this School of Public Health! Graduates, look around you. • The person behind you may develop a technology that dramatically reduces the emission of greenhouse gases. • Someone sitting in front of you may muster the organizational savvy to finally get clean water supplies to the world's poorest people. • And when you get home tonight, take a look in the mirror. You may be looking at the person whose invention, whose scientific discovery, whose political leadership, whose negotiating skills, whose marketing ability will quietly save thousands of lives. Public health is a quiet field. For those not involved in it, it is easy to ignore. That's because the successes of public health – and there are many – are largely invisible. Our most important triumphs are failures that never occur. Let me illustrate. Thanks to the 40-year public health campaign against smoking, some five million Americans have avoided smoking-related deaths that would have robbed each them of, on average, 15-20 years of life expectancy. That is an extraordinary public health accomplishment; but how many of those five million people appreciate that public health saved their lives and granted them an additional 15 or more years to spend with their children and their grandchildren? I'd guess the number is pretty close to zero. How many people in this audience quit smoking as a result of that campaign? How many of those would not be here had they not quit? I quit smoking 30 years ago. I might not be here if I hadn't. But I don't know. Public health is the failure that never occurred. As you enter your careers, you will have to understand that your rewards, your satisfactions, will be intrinsic. Your contributions will matter, but rarely will they rank banner headlines. I like to illustrate the contrast between curative medicine and public health with coverage in an issue of Newsweek magazine 20 years ago. The cover story was on interleukin 2 and the search for a cure for cancer. The magazine devoted 6-8 pages to all the latest novel technological approaches to finding a cure for cancer…not one of which ended up contributing significantly to the battle against cancer. In the same issue, buried in the middle of the magazine in the "Milestones" column, was a brief paragraph noting the passing of Albert Sabin, the inventor of the oral polio vaccine. The paragraph concluded, and I quote: "His vaccine saved 800,000 lives." Think about the contrast: Oncologists get to touch the several hundred patients whose lives they save in the course of a very worthy medical career. In the process, they earn enduring gratitude and even adulation from their former patients. Dr. Sabin never knew the name of even one of the 800,000 people whose lives he saved. Some of those people may be sitting in this audience today. Don't get me wrong. You are entering a field that will make you rich, not necessarily in the material sense, but in the far more important sense of fulfillment in having devoted your lives to bettering the human condition. You may not end up famous, but you will go to bed each night with the satisfaction of knowing that what you do matters. And you will wake up the next morning passionate to get back to work. I can wish you nothing greater than that. I choose to wish you nothing less. Congratulations, graduates of the class of 2006! Contact: Terri Mellow, director
of communications |
Contact: Terri Mellow, director of communications |
| ||||||||
Site Menu
back to top