Public Health Service fights opioid epidemic
Often deployed around globe, corps faces challenge within
WASHINGTON – They’re not military officers, but they can rightly accept the praise when strangers say, “Thank you for your service.”
They’re the U.S. Public Health Service’s Commissioned Corps, a 6,500strong group of pharmacists, engineers, dentists and others who share a broad range of health expertise and a mission to serve their country, especially the most vulnerable. In their dress blue uniforms, they’ve been to places around the globe — such as Liberia to fight Ebola, Puerto Rico to help with hurricane recovery and Alaska to deliver babies for the Indian Health Service.
As the opioid epidemic kills more than 100 people a day, surpassing natural disasters, the corps is up against some challenges from within.
President Trump’s budget proposal for 2019 criticized the corps for not keeping up with the “public health needs of the nation” and called for modernization.
“I don’t like the word modernization, as it’s probably code for cutting them and/or their budget,” says Dana FieldsJohnson, program manager for health equity at the non-profit Prevention Institute. “Why would we talk about that when they have the leadership and expertise necessary to help these commu- nities struggling to cope with the opioid epidemic?”
Surgeon General Jerome Adams and several Commissioned Corps members emphasized the importance of their role to USA TODAY during a visit to the “Prescribed to Death” opioid memorial near the White House this week.
The wall of pills signifies each of the
22,000 people who died because of opioids in 2015. The number of deaths from prescription opioids nearly doubled in 2016, and the final numbers for
2017 are likely to show another increase. The corps has its own form of embeds in communities across the world.
Adams, an anesthesiologist and former Indiana health commissioner, says he relies on corps members to get the word out that family and friends of those at risk of overdose should carry the opioid antidote naloxone. Adams called for this April 5, when he issued the first surgeon general’s advisory in 13 years. The previous one, in 2005, dealt with alcohol use during pregnancy.
The Commissioned Corps is one of the seven uniformed services tasked with “protecting, promoting and advancing the health and safety of the nation,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The other services are the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Corps members serve in HHS agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, in the Federal Bureau of Prisons and in state and local government agen- cies to ensure communities get health and emergency services.
The corps has gone from fighting plagues, including yellow fever and smallpox, to maladies that are more behavior-related. Physical fitness, obesity and injury prevention are part of the mission, along with Zika, product tampering and homelessness.
Being disparaged in the president’s budget in February stings for Jim Currie, executive director of the Commissioned Corps Association, who grumbles that some of the budget language was cribbed from a decades-old General Accounting Office report. “There’s a tendency when something is more amorphous in appropriations to go after it as a source of funds,” Currie says.
“I don’t like the word modernization, as it’s probably code for cutting them and/ or their budget. Why would we talk about that when they have the leadership and expertise necessary to help these communities struggling to cope with the opioid epidemic?”
Dana Fields-Johnson Prevention Institute