NWA EDITORIAL: To your health

For the most part, Arkansans today look to the Arkansas Department of Health as the central organization focused on the state's public health.

The concept of a public body charged with oversight of the public health, however, dates back to around 1832. That's four years before the Arkansas territory became a state. The first board of health in rugged region was the creation of the Little Rock town council. In the early days of the state, it seems the need for local board of health ebbed and flowed based on whether some illness, such as mosquito-borne yellow fever, was perceived as a threat to the population.

Until creation of a permanent state Board of Health in 1913, both state and local efforts came and went: They came with health scares and eventually went when the scares subsided. Thankfully, state leaders recognized the public health -- from communicable diseases to prenatal care to sanitary living conditions to the quality of drinking water supplies -- is inadequately addressed in fits and starts and has maintained its public health advocacy work for more than a century now.

Cities, though, still retain authority to appoint their own boards of health, a panel the City Council in Fayetteville decided in late June to reactivate in an emergency meeting. True to the history of such panels, Fayetteville had dissolved its public board of health in 2018 after a long period of dormancy.

State law allows the mayor to appoint five voting members of the local board, two of whom must be physicians, whose role will include securing "the city and its inhabitants from the evils of contagious, malignant and infectious diseases" while not creating rules inconsistent with state public health laws or rules of the state board of health. Fayetteville's measures includes creation of a paid staff position of city health officer, for which the board will recommend candidates to the mayor.

The local board's revival was proposed by Matthew Petty, the long-serving City Council member who has taken a lead on Fayetteville's response to the covid-19 pandemic and what at least some, if not all, on the City Council view as inadequacies in the response of the Arkansas Department of Health and Gov. Asa Hutchinson.

It's entirely fair, and indeed should be expected and encouraged, that the response to the coronavirus would be the subject of great debate. Everyone has an opinion about what ought to be done. Some of those opinions are even backed up by evidence, but it's also important to note that's not a prerequisite to anyone's opinion.

Fayetteville's new board of health is certainly a reasonable and even wise step. When else but in a world-changing pandemic would it make more sense to put together a panel of people with medical knowledge to advise the mayor and City Council on steps they can take to diminish the spread of a harmful virus that for some vulnerable populations can be particularly threatening?

Naturally, some people will view this through a lens of conflict with the governor's leadership, but Petty at that special meeting on June 25 emphatically said "no" to such a characterization. He stressed the panel will be independent and "not a board that is set up for a political purpose."

Perhaps he and other city leaders mean it. And perhaps the board's efforts will reflect a conscientious effort to stay out of the political realm, although that's probably a challenging goal for a panel appointed by political people to make recommendations to political people, such as the mayor and City Council, an inherently political body.

In its first meeting, members expressed criticisms of the state's guidance and voted to ask the governor to hold one of his daily covid-19 press conferences in Fayetteville within the next few weeks. In its second meeting, the panel agreed to write letters to U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Dardanelle, and John Boozeman, R-Rogers, as well as 3rd District Rep. Steve Womack, R-Rogers, to pass along their concerns about testing supply shortages.

Neither of those measures required any particular background in medical expertise. Indeed, plenty of non-medical folks share and have articulated similar concerns.

Let's just say the locally appointed board of health isn't purely political, but it's hard to suggest its actions will be above or uninvolved in politics. Where the governor holds his press conference doesn't sound like a medical opinion at all, does it?

Given the panel's makeup, though, Fayetteville's board of health could do some good in furthering the message of wise protection against the coronavirus: stay home a lot, avoid crowds, social distance as much as one can, and when distances of six or more feet aren't possible or predictable, wear those masks.

Time will tell whether reactivation of the board of health in Fayetteville will play out as a measure predominantly in the interests of public health or in the interests of politics.