With our Annual Report coming up soon, I was surfing the web to get some ideas last night and ran across our 1920 ADHS Annual Report. Call me a public health geek, but I couldn’t put my iPad down.
The Annual Report covers our agency activities that year- things like our new (1919) Midwifery regulations, an STD report (from the Bureau for the Control of Venereal Diseases chapter), efforts to improve physical activity in high schools, TB (the leading cause of death that year) and smallpox and other infectious diseases control efforts, and child welfare. Interestingly, the report (on page 14) discusses the State Legislature’s creation of the State Child Welfare Board in 1919. Since our Agency had a similarly named program, we renamed our Child Welfare Bureau the Child Hygiene Division of the State Board of Health in 1920 to avoid confusing the 2 missions.
There’s also a host of information about restaurant, grocery store, dairy and water supply sanitary inspection results for the year (by city). The Report includes a section on the Arizona State Laboratory, and Vital Statistics like Births and Deaths (by cause). Our Agency budget appears to have been a grand total of $20,000 (including $585 in federal funds).
