Resource Repository

The science is clear: vaccines save lives. And, as the COVID-19 vaccines get distributed, public health practitioners at health departments and elsewhere can play an important role in addressing concerns and building trust to support their rollout. PHI’s Berkeley Media Studies Group offers tips to help public health leaders communicate more clearly and effectively about vaccines, engage with trusted messengers and bring racial equity forward.

This is a 30-minute self-paced online module from Region IV Public Health Training Center.

This course focuses on the 10 PHRASES framing recommendations and four framing tools. The four framing tools included in the PHRASES Toolkit are frame elements, sample emails, “When You Say They Think” charts, and reframed answers to tough questions.

For more than 60 years and continuing today, the tobacco industry has targeted Black communities, especially children, with marketing for menthol cigarettes and other tobacco products like flavored cigars. The industry’s predatory marketing has had a devastating impact on Black health and lives. Tobacco use is the number one cause of preventable death among Black Americans, and tobacco-related health disparities in the Black community are largely the result of the tobacco industry’s intentional, targeted efforts to hook generations of Black Americans to deadly and addictive products. 

This report documents the pervasive and deliberate targeting of Black communities and children with advertising and promotions for menthol cigarettes and the resulting destructive impact menthol cigarettes have had on the health of Black Americans. It describes the overwhelming scientific evidence showing that menthol cigarettes are even more harmful to public health than other cigarettes – they lead to greater smoking initiation by youth and young adults, greater addiction and reduced success in quitting smoking, with a disproportionate impact on Black Americans. 

This is the first installment of the APHA HA Section–Public Health Management to Practice series. We will begin to discuss the significance of introducing racism as a public health crisis. Due to the nature of this topic, it will be delivered in three parts to capture the background of this work, application, and implications for pandemic response. Jeanette Kowalik is the former Commissioner of Health for the City of Milwaukee, and in the podcast below, she shares and reflects on being part of the first jurisdiction in the country to do this important and necessary work and apply it to the pandemic response.

APHA Past-President, Dr. Camara Jones declared racism as a public health crisis in 2016. Since then, the quest to make formal declarations was sluggish. A state affiliate crafted a resolution for the state of Wisconsin. In 2019, Milwaukee County’s Office of African American Affairs issued the first local level declaration in May of that year. This set the stage for the City of Milwaukee, the most diverse and segregated area in the country to make the declaration as a policy level intervention. At that time, city leadership collaborated on the declaration which included five action items to be accomplished within one year. The city’s Common Council and Mayor approved the declaration in July of 2019.

The COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020. Milwaukee was able to leverage its enhanced understanding of the role of racism and prioritized the need to understand how COVID-19 was impacting BIPOC residents. Within the first month of the pandemic response, Milwaukee was able to publicly show who was being most impacted by COVID-19, its Black community. Resources were limited. Local partners provided resources to slow the spread of COVID-19 in BIPOC neighborhoods. Milwaukee’s efforts in health equity also prompted other places to share their data on COVID-19 disparities to adjust prevention messaging and allocation of resources nationwide. Additionally, the Black Lives Matter movement expanded post the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, among others. Prior to this, only 14 local jurisdictions declared racism as a public health crisis. As of January 2021, over 150 jurisdictions have made the declaration.

In this 3-part podcast miniseries, current HA Section Chair, Dr. Michele McCay, and Dr. Jeanette Kowalik discuss the significance of these declarations and what action can and should look like beyond words on paper.