June 5, 2022 marks our 60th year serving as the public health agency charged with protecting and promoting the health of residents and visitors in our community. These past six decades have been filled with triumph and tragedy, and it has been an honor to serve as the District Health Officer these past few years and to be a part of the public health history that will continue to shape our community for years to come. 

When the Health District began operations in 1962, the agency employed approximately 30 employees, including four sanitarians that inspected some 800 eating and drinking establishments. Today, the Health District employs more than 800 staff members that provide a variety of expanded services and programs, including inspecting more than 17,000 permitted food establishments each year with the same commitment to the people who live in and visit Southern Nevada. 

The overarching goal of public health has always been to ensure the health and safety of communities. How that is done continues to evolve. In 1999, the Health District’s Office of Epidemiology was first established to conduct disease surveillance and investigate disease outbreaks, the internet was widely available and mobile phones were ubiquitous. Still, no one envisioned a time when tweeting, retweeting and status updates on social media would prove useful tools for an outbreak investigation. Social media proved to be just that in the wake of the 2011 Rock n’ Roll Las Vegas Marathon. In December of 2011, the Health District began receiving reports of gastrointestinal illness in marathon participants who fell ill during or after the race. Health District staff developed a survey as part of the outbreak investigation and posted it to the agency’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and the marathon’s Facebook page. Links to the survey were reposted and retweeted by marathon participants in several running forums. These venues proved to be effective methods for soliciting responses to the survey. Fast forward to 2022 and social media is now a routine communication method for the Health District for everything from program and special event information to ongoing updates during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General first reported the link between smoking and lung cancer. Since that time smoking cessation and intervention activities have evolved into innovative and evidence-based programs designed to help ensure people quit, or better yet never initiate tobacco use. In Nevada, efforts to enact smoke-free policies have met incremental successes over the past decades. These successes include the passage of the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act in 2011 and more recently, decisions by a few local sports venues and the University of Nevada Las Vegas to become a smoke-free campus.

Today, we are still treating diseases we once hoped would be eradicated such as tuberculosis and syphilis. However, we have more tools at our disposal than would ever have been thought possible 60 years ago to help ensure our services are more accessible to our clients. Services are available to clients in non-traditional settings including the Sexual Health Clinic at All Saints Episcopal Church, and at-home testing kits for gonorrhea, chlamydia, and HIV can be ordered online through the Health District’s Collect 2 Protect program. 

The Health District looks forward to leading our community into 60 more years filled with innovative programs and services, public health milestones, and working alongside our partners to meet the inevitable challenges we know our community will face.