HJBR May/Jun 2023

PUBLIC HEALTH AND MEDICINE Dianne Hartley, Editor ank you for your time. You’ve walked into the state with the poorest health rankings in the country. How can CDC help Louisiana citizens to rise out of this ranking? Houry A few things, one is to look at things like vaccination. Louisiana is in the bottom five when it comes to having the updated COVID vaccine. It’s so important because it protects yourself, it protects your family, have a data modernization team. ose are some of the things we can start to do. Editor Violence is on the rise. Do you believe discussing violence as a disease, and a contagious one at that, will advance the eradication by putting it more clearly in the crosshairs of medicine and the pub- lic health communities? Houry I think when we want to talk about Debra Houry, MD, MPH Chief Medical O cer and Deputy Director for Program and Science Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and it protects the community. at’s one of the things that we can do. e other thing is COVID has really shed one of those unflattering lights on the public health sys- tem. It was stretched before the pandemic, and now, with CDC funding in particular, $46 million is going to go to the Louisiana Department of Health to bolster workforce so that there are enough public health work- ers and they’re able to modernize their web- site and their electronic health records and ONE ON ONE 22 MAY / JUN 2023 I HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE Debra Houry, MD, MPH, is the chief medical o cer and deputy director for Program and Science at CDC. Most recently, she served as CDC’s acting principal deputy director, and prior to that, Houry served for over seven years as the director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Houry previously served as an associate professor at Emory University and emergency physician at Grady Memorial Hospital. She received MD and MPH degrees from Tulane University and completed residency training in emergency medicine at Denver Health Medical Center in Colorado.