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Health Director’s Report June-July, 2016 • In June, I was invited by UNC Chapel Hill’s Chancellor to join other Zika experts in a discussion about Zika. This event was well attended and turned out to be quite the press event. My talk focused specifically on how people can avoid Zika infection. As a result of this talk, I received an invitation to speak at a national Zika conference. Unfortunately, I had a conflict, so was not able to attend. • The General Assembly legalized syringe exchange during the short session. This law goes into effect October 1. One challenge with the legislation is that it prohibits the use of “public funds” to purchase syringes. As a result, we’ve been working with the NC Harm Reduction coalition to develop a syringe-donation program so local health departments can request syringes that have been donated. In Orange County we implemented the program prior to the passage of the legislation so the syringes we purchased will last us through this year. We’ll work with the General Assembly to get a “technical correction” to change the wording to “state funds” rather than public funds. • The salmonella outbreak associated with the Chapel Hill Creamery was a great opportunity for us to work with our state and federal partners in food safety. The investigation continues, but we know for a fact that over 50 people in NC had the identical strain of salmonella as the raw milk from the creamery. Again, I can’t state strongly enough how cooperative and proactive Chapel Hill Creamery has been in their response to this outbreak. • We have filled the newly created Integrated Behavioral Health position. We are excited to have somebody with such great experience who is also bi-lingual. We’ll have an update on the program in about 9 months. We are also close to filling the newly approved Healthy Homes/Community initiatives Health Educator position. • Congratulations to Coby Austin for being selected as the FSA/BOH program manager in June. We are close to filling her position as well. • We are struggling to recruit people into our higher-level nursing positions. We are working with the county to figure out what we can do to increase interest in our positions. A typical non- nursing job posting here at the Health Department received on average 30-50 qualified applicants. Our nursing positions may get 1 or 2 and after the interview/job offer we get a lot of no’s. We know salary is an issue, but there are other things we are exploring as well. • We were notified this month that the second year of a two year grant we had received from the Office of Minority Health was cancelled. The General Assembly decided to move those funds from the Office of Minority Health to the Division of Public Health to focus exclusively on diabetes prevention programs for minorities. Ironically, that was exactly what our program did, so we were a bit of collateral damage in this decision. This represents a loss of about $50,000. We are working on various funding scenarios to present to the county. • I participated in a call with DPH leadership and the Secretary of DHHS to brainstorm ways to decrease the number of children in the state who are excluded from school because of immunizations not being up to date (or the exemption waiver not submitted). We’ll work closely