Philadelphia, Pa., December 11, 2005
– Harold D. Cox, MSSW, chief health officer for the city of Cambridge, Mass., was presented the American Public Health Association’s 2005 Milton and Ruth Roemer Prize for Creative Local Public Health Work today in recognition for his exceptionally creative and innovative local public health efforts. Cox received the award here during APHA’s 133 rd Annual Meeting & Exposition.
Cox, who is president of the Massachusetts Public Health Association, has more than 25 years of professional experience in direct services, administration and advocacy in a variety of public health settings. He served as the director of client services for the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, managing 75 staff and 800 volunteers who were responsible for providing an array of services to people living with HIV/AIDS.
Since 1996, Cox has been responsible for managing all aspects of the Cambridge Health Department, which provides a range of services to protect the health of the community, including communicable disease prevention and control, school nursing, environmental health, emergency preparedness, health promotion, literacy promotion, regulatory activities, health data analysis and health advocacy.
During his tenure as Cambridge’s chief public health officer, the health department has won numerous awards for its early smoke-free workplace campaign, domestic violence prevention program, literacy campaign and walking programs. The department has 70 employees and an annual budget of $8 million.
Cox is the past chair of the National Association of County and City Health Officials advisory committee on HIV and other infectious diseases, the past co-chair of the Boston Black HIV/AIDS Coalition and the past chair of the Boston AIDS Planning Council.
Cox’s colleagues credit him with helping lead statewide advocacy efforts to restore deep cuts to the state’s public health budget. From inspirational speeches at rallies on the steps of the state capitol to testimony at legislative hearings to behind-the-scenes strategy development, Cox has been a driving force in successful efforts to restore more than $80 million to the health department’s budget in the past two years.
Cox’s work to develop a regional structure for coordination of public health resources and interventions in Massachusetts has become a model for other regions.
“He had to overcome tenacious bureaucratic resistance from state officials who later basked in the success of his model,” said Geoffrey W. Wilkinson of the Massachusetts Public Health Association. “He weathered initial skepticism and envy on the part of public health officers who later became proud collaborators, and he drove the process forward against the enormous weight of inertia backing an ineffective status quo.”
Among the issues Cox has helped address in Cambridge include West Nile virus, anthrax, emergency preparedness and the need for smoke-free workplaces. He and his staff led a successful campaign in the late 1990s to reduce smoking in many Cambridge restaurants.
Yet the new local ordinance did not protect all bar and restaurant workers from secondhand smoke exposure. He kept working to ensure a smoke-free work place, leading the Clean Air Works campaign that led to numerous local smoke-free work place ordinances across the state. Last year, Massachusetts became the sixth state in the nation to ban smoking in virtually all work places, and colleagues credit Cox’s early work as a major contributor to the legislation.