Public Health is All of Us

On today's episode, we focus on WIC: the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. WIC is a federally funded program that provides healthy foods, nutrition education and breastfeeding/chestfeeding support to low-income families in Multnomah County, and across the country. In 2025, Multnomah County's WIC program served over twenty thousand people in four clinics. By the end of Fiscal Year 2026, County WIC clients will have received over eight and a half million dollars worth of healthy foods. This helps make sure the babies have sufficient nutrition and food security to make it to their fifth birthday healthy and thriving. The County has served the largest and most diverse WIC client base in Oregon for the last 52 years. On this episode, we feature an interview with Multnomah County WIC Specialist Rocio Gutierrez, who tells us about the WIC program and about the grand opening of a new WIC clinic in the Rockwood neighborhood of Portland.

Public Health is All of Us is a brand new podcast produced by the Public Health Division in Multnomah County, Oregon. This podcast focuses on exploring and learning about public health in our community - why it matters, and what you need to know to keep yourself and your community safe, healthy and thriving.  So … what is public health? It's a connected, community-based health system created by a century and a half of scientific knowledge, health education, vaccinations against preventable diseases and environmental protections to keep us safe and healthy.  In the late 1800s, scientific advances helped reveal the causes of many communicable diseases whose causes had previously been a mystery. These discoveries laid the foundation for the field of public health, laying the groundwork for the virtual eradication of diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, mumps, rubella and polio in the US. Thanks to vaccines that protect the population from certain diseases, and public health advances in clean water and air, many of the diseases that plagued people around the world and here in the US a century ago are nearly unheard of today. In Multnomah County, which has the highest population of any county in Oregon, a robust public health system has worked to keep the population healthy and thriving. Even during the difficult years of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health workers in the county implemented contact tracing protocols and educated the local population on the best ways to stop the spread of the fast-moving, very contagious corona virus. Lessons learned from that period have been incorporated into a pandemic playbook that the County is ready to put into action if another virus like COVID begins to spread in the community. Now, as we enter the second half of the 2020s, the Multnomah County Public Health Division is looking ahead with new leadership and a robust comprehensive plan to ensure the safety and health of the community in the years to come. Music for this program: Friends of Yugen Jam Band (Track 3) Recorded at KBOO in April 2017 (available on the Free Music Archive)