PATRICK'S PEOPLE: Janis Goedeke was named a Public Health Hero of Kansas

Heroes don’t always have to wear tights and a flowing cape. Janis Goedeke certainly doesn’t have those items in her wardrobe, but she’s been declared a Public Health Hero of Kansas by America’s Health Rankings, United Health Foundation.

“I was quite honored, but I don’t look at myself as a hero,” said Goedeke, Crawford County health officer. “The important thing is getting out the message of public health.”

That’s a message that she knows by heart.

“People use public health every day, even if they don’t know it,” Goedeke said. “If you wake up and breathe safe air, thank public health. If  you brush your teeth with safe water, thank public health. If you take your child to safe day care, if you go to a restaurant and eat safe food, thank public health. I have thought about it and have not found anything that public health doesn’t touch in some way.”

A lifetime area resident, her first encounter with public health came  when she was a child attending a small school in Monmouth.

“My first memory of a public health nurse was when they came to school in their starched white uniforms and hats and gave us sugar cubes with polio vaccine on them,” Goedeke said. “I was so impressed.”

She received her nursing training from Mercy School of Nursing in Fort Scott and worked in medical-surgical nursing, private medical offices, long-term care facilities and in home health care.

Goedeke went to Southwest Medical School in Dallas for her OB-GYN nurse practitioner training, and began her public health career in 1989 as a nurse practitioner in family planning.

In 1996 she became the health department admininistrator/health officer for Crawford County. In this capacity she currently oversees 13 health department programs, including some that cover 18 southeast Kansas counties.

Among the programs and services provided by the department are immunization clinics with all state-mandated childhood vaccines available, as well as adult hepatitis A and hepatitis B, and seasonal on-site clinics for flu and pneumonia, school clinics for tetanus and kindergarten pre-enrollment.

There are also community health screenings, the Healthy Start program that supports pregnant women and children up to age 2, conducting licensing surveys for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment for day care homes, group day care homes, residential youth centers and attendant care programs.

WIC, a federally founded supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children covers Crawford, Bourbon and Allen Counties. The health department also houses Early Detection Works, which allows underinsured and/or uninsured women 50 and older to have annual breast screening at no charge, and women 40 and over to have yearly cervical screening at no charge.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

“We’ve had lead issues at old smelting sites, and small foodborne outbreaks that we’ve prevented from getting any larger,” Goedeke said.

Some of the incidents she’s had to deal with have even gotten national attention. For example, there was the bug invasion of late summer 2004, which started when a football team from Colorado battled the Pittsburg State University Gorillas, and went home covered in bites.

Soon after that, the health department began getting calls from area residents with similar bites. Kansas State University entomologists, PSU, epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment all got into the act with Goedeke’s department.

The culprit was finally identified as the straw itch mite, and Goedeke co-authored “Outbreak of Pruritic Rashes Associated with Mites — Kansas” in 2004 for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The mites are not disease carriers and, though irritating, were not a serious health threat. The mercury spill of October 2008, however, could have been a tragedy.

“In Kansas, five pounds is considered a big mercury spill,” Goedeke said. “We had 17 pounds spilled here.”

The spill came when youngsters found a barrel of mercury in a local building owned by the Kansas City Southern Railroad. Unaware of how dangerous the liquid metal and its vapors are, they obtained a quantity of it, played with it at the building and later spilled it on a paved skating area at Schlanger Park.

This time the Environmental Protection Agency teams came in to screen the homes of all children known to have been playing in the park at the time of the incident. Also involved was the KDHE and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Fortunately, no major health issues were detected in the screenings.

“The thing that prevented this from becoming a tragedy was that most of the mercury was spilled in a well-aereated building or outdoors,” Goedeke said.

“She is a graduate of the 2004 class of Kansas Public Health Leadership Institute and in 2005 completed a nursing certification in disaster preparedness from the St. Louis University of Nursing.

“Southeast Kansas is no stranger to disasters,” Goedeke noted. “If something is going to happen, it will happen here.”

She has served on numerous boards and committees, including the Governor’s Public Health Improvement Commission Work Task Force, Crawford County Community Coalition, Kansas Public Health Nursing Steering Committee, Children’s Advocacy Center Advisory Board and the Head Start Advisory Board, to list just a few.

She has been a member of the Kansas Public Health Association since 1996 and was KPHA president for 2007-2008.

But Goedeke still claims to be no kind of a hero.

“My 25 employees here are certainly heroes because of the services they provide to the community,” she said.

Linda Grilz, outgoing Crawford County Commissioner, is ready to grant them all hero status.

“In case people wonder what kind of employees we have here in Crawford County, we have some good ones,” she said.