Georgia public health officials tell lawmakers prevention, lab and home‑visiting programs are central to keeping communities well

Dr. Becky Toomey, a long‑time public health leader with the Georgia Department of Public Health, told a Georgia House study committee that public health’s chief mission is to prevent disease, protect communities and promote health at the population level.

Toomey, a longtime state epidemiologist and public‑health clinician, outlined routine and emergency public‑health work, from newborn screening to outbreak investigations, and described how those functions operate differently than clinical care. “What public health focuses on is prevention, protecting and improving health of communities,” she said, adding that population‑level interventions “will clearly improve the health of all the individuals in the community.”

Public health’s value, witnesses told the committee, is often invisible until a local outbreak or a system stressor occurs. Toomey described two investigations that led to policy changes beyond the immediate outbreak: a norovirus cluster tied to decorated cakes that reinforced glove requirements in food service, and a 2006 E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to a Cobb County water park that prompted changes in pool design and chlorine‑monitoring rules after several children were infected. “It was such an — to me, it was so interesting,” she said of the cake investigation, and of the water‑park case she recalled…