Luchini saw an evolution: “We grew from a focus on infectious diseases to overall wellness and the social determinants of health and how to delay or prevent those chronic disease. He built a lot of bridges with a lot of partners we didn’t have before.” Dr. Bird became the epitome of a public health doctor, but he didn’t start out that way. Although he wanted to be a doctor as long as he can remember, he started in pediatrics and took a detour into the navy as a flight surgeon before joining the Fresno County Department of Public Health in 1986. His first job was serving medically indigent patients as a primary care physician in Coalinga and he worked as the tuberculosis controller, the communicable disease controller and the health director for the Fresno County Jail before becoming the county public health officer during the last five years of his tenure there. David Pomaville, director of the public health department, noted, “Dr. Bird has helped Fresno County address many emerging health issues, including childhood lead poisoning, mosquito-borne illnesses, measles, congenital syphilis and many others. He’s provided medical leadership in preparing Fresno County address pandemic flu, biologic terrorism and Ebola. But his best gift he provided is his writing which articulates the concerns of public health in our community.” It takes a community to create a healthy community Dismal healthcare ratings for Fresno County spurred Dr. Bird to pick up his pen and urge others to do something about it. That first op-ed outlined what he calls his greatest accomplishment: The Eight Pillars of Public Health. “Within a few months of being appointed as interim health officer the health rankings came out (from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) and we were almost dead last in California,” Dr. Bird described. “I was fussing and fretting about what to say if media called. And then I only got one call from a radio station. That was it. I thought ‘Have we just given up here or what?!’ That led to my first op-ed.” When he showed it to his boss, Pomaville urged him to put in a stronger call to action. That’s advice he took and used to create 43 op-eds and several Community Health newsletters. In his writing, Dr. Bird tackled things like needle exchanges for drug users, the opioid epidemic, teen sex, vaping, high syphilis rates, the cost of bad air quality, mental health inequities and the over proliferation of tobacco, junk food and alcohol advertising in poor neighborhoods. He explained how lack of dental care – something that 14% of children younger than 11 in Fresno County have never had – can affect nutrition, communication, socialization, sleeping and
Winter 2019
academic performance. He urged mothers to choose breast feeding for their babies and employers and communities to support that choice. “I’d have tackled even more topics but Dave held me back since he’s more politically astute than I am,” Dr. Bird added. That first op-ed may be his most enduring. Dr. Bird wrote about the eight public health pillars – individuals, families, employers, retailers, healthcare providers, educators, community/spiritual leaders and public/government officials – and how they must work in concert to support and encourage better health. His writings still stand on the Fresno County Public Health Department’s web site and the Pillars of Public Health has been incorporated into the department’s programs, said Pomaville. Retired only a few months, Dr. Bird is now turning his attention to the foster care system, knowing that children who experience trauma are nearly twice as likely to have serious and chronic health problems as adults. He’s part of a committee to look at improvements for foster children and is continuing his work advocating for an underserved community.
Becoming an advocate for the dead
Dr. David Hadden’s passion was about speaking up for those who could no longer speak for themselves. And he did it with a flair that reporters loved, said his longtime colleague, Pathologist Venu Gopal, M.D. “We would always say the dead tell tales so listen to the tale,” Dr. Gopal said. Dr. Gopal said that Dr. Hadden had a talent for being in the spotlight and loved explaining the inner workings of the morgue to any new reporter who came to Fresno. And when camera crews from the Discovery Channel would come to do reenactments of Fresno’s odder homicides, Dr. Hadden would often spice up the shoot by adding in extra action to make it more interesting, said Dr. Gopal. In May 2009, Dr. Hadden made headlines around the world when he invited the media in for a tour of the decrepit former Fresno County morgue to see maggots crawling out of the walls and dripping from the ceiling. He told the media that it wasn’t really fair to ask grieving families to come through a cramped, rundown building buzzing with flies to identify their loved ones. And it wasn’t right, he asserted, for the dead to be housed in such shabbiness before their final resting place. Dr. Gopal said Dr. Hadden put him up in front of the Fresno County supervisors at a board meeting to reiterate those same points.
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