YOUR ASSOCIATION
DirecTalk
Big Bend
David Dyjack, DrPH, CIH
F lashing red lights delivered a wave of anxiety as I directed my rented sport utility vehicle onto a dusty track ad- jacent to the road. Two heavily armed border patrol agents disembarked from their white Suburban while a third escorted a lunging dog. I rolled down the driver’s side window and greeted one agent, while the second peered into the passenger side of the vehicle. All the while the dog snied and snued the perimeter of the car. “Good afternoon, sir, are you an Ameri- can citizen?” I answered in the armative. The three men nodded to one another, thanked me for my cooperation, and abruptly vaporized into the mesquite. I remain astonished by the brevity and thoroughness of the interaction. Big Bend National Park is a leviathan, over 800,000 acres located on the Rio Grande in West Texas, a 6-hr drive from Austin. Magi- cal, sacred, awe inspiring, and evidently well patrolled to detect and interdict individuals who attempt entry into the U.S. sans the proper paperwork. I suppose the heavy coating of o- road dust coupled with my bandana headwrap raised suspicions of law enforcement. This interaction with the law occurred in October 2022, a couple days before the Texas Environmental Health Association conference in Round Rock, Texas, a suburban enclave adja- cent to Austin. Visiting Big Bend was the clos- est thing I have to a bucket list item and I was pleased by the opportunity to draw down some paid time o to visit the park. The extremes there defy logic. Big Bend is at the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert, and incongruently is subject to violent floods. My first day there was a brutally dry and sunny 95 °F while the next
seem to have backed ourselves into an abyss with no clear path forward. Let me explain. I’ve observed that our inspection software systems are divorced from public health. That is, our data appear to be largely disconnected from the larger ecosystem of data reporting that is visibly delivered to state and federal aggregators. Exceptions do exist, for exam- ple, around reportable vectors and Twitter scraping, among others. But by and large, we seem to be closed o from the rest of the pub- lic health universe. We are good at what we do when it comes to software. We make it easy for customers to apply for a permit, simple to pay for it, and easy to report corrective actions. Like- wise, our inspection data have been elegantly designed, again with some exceptions, to hyperfocus on the task at hand—assessing compliance. While that is important and useful, it doesn’t lend itself to broader pub- lic health discussions and ultimately invest- ments. In short, I feel we have cut ourselves o from the rest of the cosmos that is dedi- cated to preventive arts and sciences. Unless we are careful and showcase excep- tions, I sense those of us in the governmental environmental public health enterprise are increasingly at risk of being packaged and traded to code enforcement and/or weights and measures. We run the risk of not being valued for our scientific expertise or commu- nity insight. We’re seen as compliance o- cers. In the political universe, we might even be seen as a necessary evil and not the valu- able, impactful profession that we are.
Do we focus on ourselves or do we focus on the system?
morning the temperature hovered around 55 °F and was accompanied by torrential rain. The quixotic weather provides a signal for plant and animal life to surge into action as the elements become conducive for identifying new home- steads, scouring for food, and exploring for mates. For my part it was a feast for the senses. Big Bend is the ecological dominant in Texas. A literal oasis in a parched landscape. I wondered at the timing of the seasons and how fine-tuned the natural environment is at extracting the most benefit from the intermittent fecund conditions. There may be a message for us there among the agave, yucca, and ocotillo. Over the last year there has been consid- erable attention and investment into data systems. Disturbingly, I feel that much of the public health community doesn’t understand our profession, with some exceptions. If they did, why haven’t more of us been invited as contributors to the nationwide data modern- ization initiative or included as beneficiaries of those investment dollars? The ecosystem seems ripe for us to be inserted into this national informatics discussion. I’m not con- vinced those within our professional environ- mental health network understand that we
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