Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence

and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists,

community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas

or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question

at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, I'm talking to Don Hunter, deputy director of the southeastern region for the network

for public health law.

Our topic is the national movement to declare racism a public health crisis and its implications for efforts to address the disproportionate harm of the COVID pandemic

on minority communities.

Let's listen.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Now, you've been studying these declarations of racism as a public health crisis.

Yes, a colleague and I, Betsy Lawton, at the Network for Public Health Law, we looked at

24 of the original declarations that came out earlier this year, but that actually also

included two that were issued at the end of 2019.

And we looked at what cities and counties were committing to and declaring racism a public health crisis and tried to find some common themes.

Now, are these cities and counties located in one part of the country, or is this a national kind of movement?

They're all over at this point.

They're now declarations have been issued in over 30 states, 160 cities, counties, organizations

...