Joseph Kanter headshot courtesy of ASTHO.
At every step of his career, Joseph Kanter, MD, MPH, has been digging deeper into the root causes of health inequities. Going from treating patients one on one in the emergency room to improving outcomes for all Louisianans as the state’s health officer, Kanter has sought upstream solutions to deeply embedded challenges. He now supports health departments across the country making these strides in his role as CEO of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO).
de Beaumont chatted with Kanter — a 2019 40 Under 40 in Public Health honoree — as he navigates his first year leading ASTHO and looks to the future of public health practice.
What inspired you to transition from emergency medicine to public health?
Through working in the ER as a resident, we interfaced with all types of issues that health departments deal with. Anything that falls through the cracks, we see it in the ER. Interpersonal violence, domestic violence, sexual assault, addiction and overdose, mental health challenges — all of that falls to the ER if it’s not being adequately controlled in the community. I got to know various programs the City of New Orleans Health Department was doing through my work in the ER and got to partner on a number of those.
When you’re working in the ER, you can take care of the patient in front of you, and you don’t have a lot of time to do that because you’ve got a waiting room full of other patients that need your care. But when you work in public health, you can work far upstream, and instead of helping one patient you can help 1,000.
What excites me now is I get to help health departments across the country do exactly what I found so exhilarating before, which is develop upstream interventions and help the lives of communities.
What should we be talking about more in public health?
Right now, the most important thing to me is finding better ways to communicate the everyday success stories that we do in public health. One of the curses of public health is that our failures tend to be public, and our successes are secret. And oftentimes in public health, we’re doing the best job that we possibly can. Nobody knows about it because you take it for granted that the water coming out of your tap is safe to drink and the food is safe, and other programs that help reduce disease and so forth. It’s only when those falter that that really makes a headline.
There’s clearly a lot of politicization of our field now coming out of the pandemic, and a lot of opportunists take cheap shots at our field. I think one of the things that allows them to do that is we’re humble. We’re a humble group and we haven’t done that great of a job of publicizing our everyday successes. I’m interested in finding better ways to communicate the really good work that health departments do every day that nobody knows about.
What words of wisdom do you have for emerging public health practitioners?
This is an incredibly pivotal time to be in the field of public health. It’s really an honor to be part of that and help people recognize that we’re coming out of a 100-year pandemic, and one in which the very core of our profession has been challenged. You would think we would come out of this stronger but that’s not the reality. The very core is challenged. Our work is being politicized in ways that never has before. But in that challenge is opportunity. We have an opportunity now to reintroduce ourselves as a profession, to the country and to re-educate people on what it is that we do and why our work is important.
What public health media has had an impact on you?
There’s a documentary that made a big impact on me called How to Survive a Plague. It is the story of how, in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and crisis, a group of activists successfully lobbied the FDA and the NIH to start bringing in more drugs for trial and for patient use. It gets to the heart of effective activism and how people in positions of power can change their mind and can listen to community members and not be dogmatic.
How do you kick back when you’re not working?
We really like going out and seeing music as a family in New Orleans. We like biking to festivals in New Orleans and taking our kids to Jazz Fest. It’s been really exciting as our kids have gotten old enough to appreciate music to watch what it does for them and how it just expands their brain, and I love watching them dance. That’s been our favorite family activity.
The de Beaumont Foundation’s 40 Under 40 in Public Health initiative recognizes and elevates leaders changing the face of public health in creative and innovative ways. Learn more about the program and its application process.
