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, the global pandemic. We are broadening the podcast to other urgent public health issues.

Today, I'm speaking to Dr. George's Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

Dr. Benjamin is one of the most trusted and experienced leaders in the field of public health.

We interviewed him a while ago on the COVID pandemic.

Now we speak about what it means to talk about racism as a public health issue.

Let's listen. Dr. Benjamin, thank you so much for joining

us again on the podcast. Today I want to talk to you about racism and public health. And I just

want to start with a question to you as the head of the American Public Health Association.

What does it mean to call racism a public health issue? Well, you know, we always talk a lot about what the root causes of any kind of disease or injury.

And so racism is fundamentally a social determinative health.

And in many ways, it is the original sin that has resulted in a whole range of

Dairsford health impacts.

So I think public health is finally recognized that if we don't address racism at its very

core, we're not going to be able to fundamentally improve health and address health inequities.

So when you think of the impact of racism on health,

where does your mind go first?

My mind first goes to the fact that we treat people very differently

in a variety of ways.

We know that it's about access to health care. It's about the differences in the quality of both care that people receive is differences in the behavioral way in which people think about health. And then, of course, particularly on the mental health side, the enormous amount of stress, which we ultimately

know results in a range of impacts on health

...