president’s & executive director’s message
A Message from the President
A year as APHL President seemed like
a very long time in June of 2017 as
the annual meeting wrapped up in
Providence. It turned out to be a fast-
paced, busy and interesting year of new
concepts and ideas as we explored the
role of public health laboratories in the
opioid overdose crisis and made steady
progress in solidifying the structure of
the National Biomonitoring Network.
Misuse of opioids continues to take a
heavy toll on the nation. While much
of the focus has been on precise
counting of fatal overdoses and the
drugs involved in each tragic case, at
APHL we are trying to bring attention to
the existing gap in opioid surveillance:
the close calls, the warning bells, the
non-fatal overdoses. We have brought
together our partners at CDC NCEH/
DLS, home of the LRN-C, and the
National Center for Injury Prevention
and Control to increase awareness of
the potential role of public health
in particular, which some consider
the most advanced in the world.
We met Dr. Koch at his laboratory,
which, to our surprise, was located in
a hospital at the Institute for Prevention
and Occupational Medicine at Ruhr-
Universität Bochum. This is no accident:
the German biomonitoring program
and the EU human biomonitoring
system both emphasize the link
between environmental exposures and
occupational medicine, and the German
program administers a repository
of biological specimens for method
validation or population-based studies.
Moreover, EU biomonitoring laboratories
are virtually all university-based although
they may receive government funding.
PublicHealthLabs
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laboratories. In the Opioids
Community of Practice, we have
shared state approaches to laboratory-
based surveillance and exchanged
information on the science of