FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Media Relations
What do we, and most Americans want? We want a safe place to live, learn, work and play, for ourselves and our families. That means having clean water, clean air, healthy food, protection from environmental harm and access to the full range of essential health services so that we all have the opportunity to live our best, healthiest lives.
To achieve this, America needs a strong public health system at the federal, state and local levels to help identify threats to our health and use the latest science to implement practices and interventions that can protect our health. This requires a robust workforce focused on tracking disease outbreaks and vaccinating communities to avoid the spread of disease, setting safety standards to protect workers, developing school nutrition programs to ensure kids have access to healthy food, advocating for laws to keep people safe, including smoke-free indoor air and seatbelts, and addressing the threats that climate change poses to our health. It also requires work to address chronic public health problems, including the gun violence epidemic, our behavioral health crisis, rising maternal deaths and so much more.
State and local health workers play an important role in protecting our health, but they can’t do it alone. The federal government needs to lead the way in providing essential funding, leading research, delivering technical assistance, analyzing and approving drugs as safe and effective, tracking and identifying health trends, developing science-based guidance and sharing key health information for the public to make critical life and health decisions.
With appropriate resources, public health professionals can work together with other leaders throughout industry and government to move us toward the vision of a healthy America for ourselves and future generations. This investment in public health infrastructure, preventive care, medical research and tracking disease outbreaks would yield huge dividends in improved health for Americans and overall reduced health care costs, since it is much easier, effective and cheaper to prevent or treat illnesses early on. The COVID-19 pandemic clearly showed America that disease outbreaks not only cost human lives — they can cost trillions of dollars in lost output and reduction of the workforce.
We don’t know what President Trump will say in his address to Congress, but many of his administration’s actions to date threaten to roll back much of the progress we have made and endanger the health and well-being of our communities.
For over 150 years, the American Public Health Association has worked with each administration to improve the lives of all Americans. We call on the Trump administration to end its indiscriminate efforts to cut spending and reduce the federal workforce and instead work on ways to improve and prioritize the health of all communities. We see an opportunity to improve the health of the nation, coupled with our great concern for recent actions, but we stand ready to work with anyone open to seriously considering evidence-based policies to enable optimal, equitable health and well-being for all. Similarly, we will continue to challenge the spread of health misinformation and efforts to undermine the nation’s public health system or advance policies that are harmful to the public’s health.
For more information on our perspective of President Trump’s work, contact APHA Media Relations.
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The American Public Health Association champions optimal, equitable health and well-being for all. With our broad-based member community and 150-year perspective, we influence federal policy to improve the public’s health. Learn more at www.apha.org.