Swine Flu? Vermont Health Commissioner Wendy Davis Isn't Sweating It
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Summary
In an interview last week in her corner office at Burlington's Cherry and St. Paul streets, Davis said that when she took the top health department job almost a year ago, she wasn't anticipating "the intensity of the economic challenge we'd be facing." And although she does have experience with an earlier threat of a swine-flu pandemic, she could not have foreseen the onset of the HlNl virus. It has so far killed three Americans and infected at least one Vermoriter. While the contagion appears to be in abeyance in Vermont at present, "I won't be surprised if we have more confirmed cases here," Davis says.
Slender and quick to smile, Davis has a self-effacing manner that doesn't entirely cloak her selfassurance. She says she brings to the health department the same determination that marked her 25 years of doctoring - mostly at University Pediatrics and later at Timberlane Pediatrics. "I'm driven in my job," she declares. "I start by deciding what's the right thing to do for a patient and a family. You'll then run into barriers that may be difficult to surmount, but you always do your best to overcome them.""Hawkeye" may actually have been a fictional amalgam of many field surgeons who labored under sometimes surreal and always difficult circumstances during the Korean War in the early 1950s. But as she watched the TV series "M*A*S*H" (a takeoff on the movie of the same name) on CBS in the '70s and '80s, the commissioner recalls, "I'd see certain aspects of that character and say 'that's [John Davis].'"See the full content of this document
Extract
Swine Flu? Vermont Health Commissioner Wendy Davis Isn't Sweating It
Howard Dean isn't the only physician to pursue a second career as a public administrator in Vermont. State Health Commissioner Wendy Davis is following the blazes Dean put in place - but only up to a point. She says that while she admired Dean's success as governor in making health coverage available to all of Vermont's children, she has no interest herself in seeking elected office.
Davis, 55, does have the char...See the full content of this document
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