Elders speaks out on health issues

By Mary Wade Burnside
Times West Virginian

FAIRMONT April 06, 2008 12:44 am

— It has been more than 13 years since Dr. Joycelyn Elders resigned under pressure as Surgeon General for her views that children should be educated about sex and birth control, but the pediatrician and health official has not backed away from the current events on the topic.
“There was a report that came out last week that said 33 percent of our adolescents had a sexually transmitted disease,” Elders told a crowd celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Monongahela Valley Association of Health Centers Inc. on Saturday at the facility’s Locust Avenue clinic.
“This is with things such as HPV — Human Papillomavirus — for which we have a vaccine. People say, ‘I don’t want my daughter to have the vaccine because if she would get the vaccine, that would mean that would give her permission to go out and have sex.’
“Well, everybody who drove a car here today has got insurance on their car. Everybody with a house has insurance on their house. Well, you want to insure your house and insure your car. Why don’t you insure your child?”
The vaccine, Gardacil, can protect girls from four types of HPV that cause 70 percent of cervical cancers, but health officials recommend inoculating children starting at age 11, which has upset some parents.
Not Elders, who was known for her short but colorful tenure in the Clinton administration for advocating condom use for adolescents instead of just abstinence, backing up her views with the quote: “The vows of abstinence break far more easily than a latex condom.”
Or, as she told a delighted crowd who laughed and clapped at Elders’ remarks: “We’ve not taught our children” about sex because people think “if you tell them about it, they’ll go out and do it. I say, ‘If you look around, they’re already doing it.’”
But the issue of sex and education was not the only one Elders addressed. The Arkansas native, first appointed by then-Gov. Bill Clinton in 1987 as the director of the Arkansas Department of Health, is well-versed in many medical issues, including those that pertain to the rural poor.
That fit right in during a celebration for a clinic that was established in 1958 to take care of members of the United Mine Workers of America under a pre-paid medical plan.
“The UMW helped to establish the clinic to treat their miners,” said clinic CEO Nancy Vandergrift. “They paid in advance and the patients just got treated.”
Now the clinic is open to anyone in the community and services can be offered on a sliding-scale fee to those who qualify.
In her opening remarks, Vandergrift noted that she was proud to be a coal miner’s daughter and granddaughter, a theme that apparently resonated with Elders, the daughter of sharecroppers who went to medical school on the GI bill after serving in the U.S. Army.
“As you talk about being a coal miner’s daughter and granddaughter, I have to say, I’m a sharecropper’s daughter and granddaughter, and I can say it’s a real pleasure to see that you’ve turned one of those nine coal miner’s clinics... into state-of-the-art care.”
But she also said the United States, one of the richest countries in the world, has to do better in the field of health care.
“We’ve come a long way in medicine in the United States, but we’ve got a long way to go. We’ve have the most expensive sick-care system. We’ve got a sick-care system. We have almost 300 million people and we spend 16 percent of our gross domestic product — $2.1 trillion — on health care. We in Arkansas and West Virginia don’t know how much that is,” she said as the audience laughed.
However, as much as the country spends, she said, the United States remains behind 57 other countries in “overall goodness of health.
“We spend more of our gross domestic product than anybody else — 16 percent. The next highest country is Canada, with 10 (percent). And we don’t have the best health care.”
Elders also touched on access to doctors in rural areas — and urban.
“We’ve got to make sure people have transportation,” she said. “I live in Arkansas, and sometimes, getting to the doctor — you may have insurance, you may know you are sick, but you don’t have a way. I’ve been told the highest incidence of preventable blindness is within a one-mile radius of Johns Hopkins University (in Baltimore). They have the largest eye institute in the world. That’s because people couldn’t get there.”
In addition to educating people about taking care of themselves, Elders also advocated eliminating disparities in health care.
“We want to have 100 percent access and zero percent disparity,” she said. “If any of you believe we have achieved that goal, I have a farm in Arkansas.”
Elders traveled to Fairmont in spite of tornadoes in Arkansas that caused her plane to arrive at Pittsburgh at 4 a.m., said the Rev. Richard Bowyer, the chairman of the MVA board, who explained, “She was bright-eyed and ready to go when I picked her up at 10 a.m.”
In an interview prior to her remarks, Elders took a diplomatic approach to addressing the current race for a Democratic nominee for president between her old colleague and friend, Sen. Hillary Clinton, and Sen. Barack Obama.
“I’m solidly a Democrat and I’m still looking at the candidates,” she said. “I feel we must have the very best candidate for this country.”
Elders, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Arkansas, noted that she still sees the Clintons “occasionally, when they come to Arkansas, but they aren’t in Arkansas much anymore because she’s a senator from New York.”
She did admit that the possibility of female or African-American president does intrigue her.
“It’s been really difficult for me,” she said. “It’s not a flip answer and I listen carefully to both of them. I think they are both wonderful. I won’t have a problem supporting either one of them.”
E-mail Mary Wade Burnside at mwburnside@timeswv.com.

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