At a commencement ceremony several years ago, Dr. Linda Rae Murray, then-president of the American Public Health Association (APHA), recounted a famous saying: “When public health works, we’re invisible.” She followed that by urging the graduates to “refuse to be invisible, because […] we need to lend our strength and our science to broad social movements whose goal is to make things better.”

When public health is invisible, we only end up talking about it when things go wrong; people tend to think about public health agencies as entities that respond to infectious disease outbreaks or shut down a restaurant due to health code violations. We frequently think about health as healthcare, but what determines how long and how well we live is less about what happens in the doctor’s office and more about where we live, the air we breathe, and the availability of other resources in our communities. At the Baltimore City Health Department, we believe that all issues – education, housing, employment, public safety, and beyond – can and should be tied back to health. We are committed to making the progress earned through public health visible, and to make the case for incorporating health-in-all policies across the City.

Subscribe to the Bmore Healthy newsletter.

Anybody who knows someone at risk of an opioid overdose should always carry naloxone, the anti-overdose drug, Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said Thursday. 

Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen said the plan is a good first step.

Read the entire story.

US Surgeon General Jerome Adams will on Thursday issue a nationwide advisory — the first from his office in 13 years — for more people to get access to and training for the overdose-reversing drug naloxone.

“Unfortunately, we are having to ration naloxone because we simply don’t have the resources to purchase this life-saving antidote,” Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “Every week, we count the doses we have left and make hard decisions about who will receive the medication and who will have to go without.”

Read the entire story.

The surgeon general issued the office’s first advisory in 13 years — calling on more people to carry the opioid overdose antidote naloxone.

Dr. Leana Wen, the health commissioner of Baltimore, has seen some of this firsthand. In the past, naloxone has typically required a prescription. But in 2015, her office issued a standing order that effectively acted as a blanket prescription for the entire city of Baltimore.

Read the entire story.