Welcome to Public Health on Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins and also a former health commissioner in Baltimore City.

Until recently, our sole focus has been COVID-19 and the global pandemic.

We are broadening the podcast now to other urgent public health issues.

This episode is being broadcast on June 10th,

a day commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, on June 19th, 1865,

when Union soldiers finally reached Galveston, Texas. I speak with Dr. Maria Trent, a professor

of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins and the chief of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine

at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Dr. Trent is the lead author of a landmark statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics that was published last summer,

entitled The Impact of Racism on Child and Adolescent Health.

We speak about this urgent topic

and what pediatricians and others who care about children

can do about it.

Let's listen.

Dr. Trent, thank you very much for joining me on this podcast.

I'm really wanting to talk to you about this landmark position statement that the American Academy of Pediatrics took called the impact of racism on child and adolescent health. It came out last summer. And you were the lead author. How did this statement come about?

So the AAP policy state, first of all, thank you for having me, but the AAP policy statement

was really in progress for over two years before it was produced last summer. It just so

happened to really coincide with the events that were happening in El Paso, which I think

was timing that was essential because I think

it allowed for us to really talk about discrimination in a thoughtful way. But I think we were

...