Injury prevention, epidemiology, obesity among new Linn County Public Health director's priorities

The new leader of Linn County Public Health sees the department's role as a partnership with other agencies, organizations and individuals.

Pramod Dwivedi, 47, won't tell restaurant owners what to post on their menus or demand changes without community input, he said.

“Public health is a team sport,” said Dwivedi, who started his job this week as director of Linn County Public Health. “You can't just go ahead and impose your ideas in order to accomplish something.”

Dwivedi, who holds master's degrees from the University of Iowa in social work and preventive medicine and environmental health, most recently served as Chief of Epidemiology at the Shelby County Health Department in Memphis, Tenn.

He previously led several programs, including the Healthy Homes and Lead Poisoning Prevention Program for the Chicago Department of Public Health; Chronic Disease Epidemiology Division at the Indiana State Department of Health and Surveillance Epidemiology and Evaluation at the Tennessee Department of Health.

Dwivedi also directed the Epidemiology Division for the Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department in Lincoln, Neb., and is a doctoral candidate in public health leadership at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He replaces Curtis Dickson, who retired in 2011 after 2 ½ years as director.

His salary will be $95,000. The department's budget for fiscal 2013 is $4.7 million, with 47 employees.

Dickson, who earned $104,000 when he left, was hired with an aggressive agenda to change the role of the health department, attracting attention for his calls for banning trans fats in restaurant food and requiring local restaurants to include calorie counts on menus.

He was unable to put those concepts in place, but obtained a $2 million grant to address tobacco use in Linn County.

Dwivedi said obesity is among the pressing issues in Linn County, as it is elsewhere in the nation. He is also concerned about racial disparities in infant mortality; youth substance abuse and injuries.

His initial priorities include creating an injury prevention program and hiring an epidemiologist, who would not only track disease outbreaks, but have a role in areas such as policy and chronic disease.

He also will call for more robust GIS mapping, such as hot spots for infant mortality or immunization needs, and will plot data of emergency room visits to see if a correlation exists between the county's air quality and asthma.

Dwivedi and his wife, Seema, have two daughters. One will be a freshman at the University of Iowa and the other will be an 11

^th

-grader in the fall.