2024 Public Health Laboratory Annual Report
MDH Speaks: Sharing Important Public Health Stories
At the Public Health Laboratory, we are always searching for ways to let the public know about the vital and fascinating work the Department of Health does every day to keep Minnesotans healthy and safe. We firmly believe that the more people are aware of what we do, the more they can benefit from it.
A general distrust of government programs among the public can sometimes lead to negative health outcomes. For instance, a significant percentage of parents refuse to have their newborns screened for diseases at birth. Those parents miss the chance to discover hidden conditions that threaten their newborns’ lives.
To publicize important health-related matters, we launched MDH Speaks, a series of brief presentations telling stories relating to public health. MDH Speaks takes its inspiration from TED Talks, the wildly successful lecture series. As with TED Talks, each MDH Speaks presentation is filmed and put on YouTube to reach the widest possible audience.
In two years of MDH Speaks presentations, speakers have covered everything from mercury poisoning arising from toxic beauty standards to an expert in sexually transmitted diseases who became known as the “Queen of Chlamydia.”
The 2024 MDH Speaks event was held at the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum in St. Paul. The tone was set by Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Brooke Cunningham. She talked about her career path from doctorates in medicine and sociology to becoming the top public health official in Minnesota. Her research in developing strategies to reduce racial disparities in health outcomes informs her leadership in achieving our goal of health equity. See her talk below and the five others on the 2024 MDH Speaks event page.
The 2023 MDH Speaks event was kicked off by an explanation of why the CDC once warned people not to “kiss or snuggle hedgehogs.” Other talks covered mpox, “phantom organisms,” environmental radiation, and more. See the 2023 MDH Speaks presentations.
Return to the main 2024 Annual Report page.