June 4, 2009
New director of Environmental Health & Safety no stranger to UW
By Elizabeth Sharpe
Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences
Jude Van Buren, an alumna of the UW’s Department of Environmental Health, returned to her alma mater this month as director of Environmental Health & Safety, a department that supports and monitors workplace safety and health practices at the university. She brings with her a wealth of experience, a passion for public health and a philosophy that underlies her work: public health is about education.
A native of Pasco, Wash., Van Buren received her associate’s degree in Nursing in 1973 from Columbia Basin College. She then enlisted as a Peace Corps public health nurse in Ecuador and Paraguay, where she learned about the need for sanitation and the importance of environmental health in limiting disease spread.
In Paraguay, she found the villagers’ diet deficient in protein. So, she tried to convince them that the peanuts they raised to feed to their pigs and hogs were good for them, too. She remembers one day whipping up a batch of peanut butter, then handing a man in the village a spoon to try some. As someone unfamiliar with the taste and texture of peanut butter — thick and peanut-pasty — he didn’t look much like he was enjoying the taste. But he still ate it, and afterwards he explained: “The senorita’s eating it, so it must be good for you.”
It’s moments like these she remembers most. “I think public health is about education, trying to teach and trying to spread the word about what causes disease and illness, and how to prevent exposure and disease. Those are the real moments that I think most about when I think back on my career, that shred of light that made a difference in a person’s understanding of their disease and their exposure.”
She returned to the United States and started the UW’s bachelor’s program in Environmental Health. She said her experience as an undergraduate in the department and background in nursing led to her interest in applied research in public health.
After graduation from the UW in 1984, she was a sanitarian for the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department before moving to Maryland, where she earned a master’s degree and doctoral degree in public health from The Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1997.
She worked in Maryland and then in Washington at the state health department, managing food safety programs, chemical and physical hazard programs, and performing epidemiological evaluations. Van Buren also taught environmental health at The Evergreen State College in Olympia. Most recently, she was director of the Division of Epidemiology, Health Statistics, and Public Health Laboratories at the Washington State Department of Health, where she oversaw notifiable condition reporting and epidemiological reviews, disease diagnostics, and state vital records management.
“It’s been an interdisciplinary journey,” Van Buren said of her career. “Each position has enabled me to understand a bit more about how environmental agents, infectious or non-infectious, can impact human physiology and how exposures can be reduced or eliminated.”
She has also enjoyed working with “dedicated, curious, and creative people who really want to make a difference.” Public health professionals, Van Buren explains, continually seek to learn and look for ways to improve public health outcomes, qualities that are “so essential in a field as dynamic as public health.”
“A background in both public health nursing and environmental health helps you understand public health needs from soup to nuts,” she said. Public health nurses typically work one-on-one with individuals and their families, such as helping sick children who are missing vaccinations or having diarrheal disease from drinking contaminated water. “Working in environmental health,” Van Buren says, “is more of a 10,000-foot holistic and prevention perspective.”
“Environmental health interventions work to ensure, for example, clean drinking water and sanitation for whole communities — not just the individual, continues Van Buren. “Your patients or clients are the community and your goal is to determine exposures, limit those exposures, and work to meet regulatory requirements placed on a community for exposure to infectious, chemical and radiological agents, as well as address injury and accident causation.” Her research addressing lead poisoning, an environmental exposure issue for children, combined these two disciplines and found that good nutrition appears to act to impede the uptake of lead in the GI tract.
Van Buren replaces Karen VanDusen, who retired from the University last fall. These two women have more in common than this position and their last names. VanDusen was Jude Van Buren’s former teacher. Van Buren remembers VanDusen as an inspiration to her, a mentor. VanDusen encouraged Van Buren to return to school and then championed Van Buren to continue her education after she graduated.
