This is the third of four blogs about Monmouth County's six Health Departments.
Other than Long Branch (1874) and the M.C. Regional Health Commission (1936), the health departments that exist today in the County were formed in the 1970’s, when two different sets of legislation were once again pushing local health departments to consolidate.
The Manalapan Township Health Department, and the Freehold Township Health Department, that includes Upper Freehold Township, were established 1978. The Colts Neck Health Department was formed in 1979. The Monmouth County Health Department was established in 1978, although the Monmouth County Freeholders had begun budgeting for a county health department as early as 1974.
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In 1974 the NJ County and Municipal Government Commission issued the Musto Report, which resulted in the Local Health Services Act of 1975. This was the first time that licensed Health Officers were required to be employed full-time in all county and municipal Health Departments. While Health Officers and Sanitary Inspectors had been required to be licensed by the state since 1905, most municipal health departments had been employing Health Officers and Sanitary Inspectors part-time. Out of 291 health departments statewide in 1974, there were still 177 municipalities that did not have a full-time health officer.
Before 1975, a less qualified “Executive Officer” could serve part-time in place of a licensed Health Officer for towns with a population less than 10,000. Ray English, who was the Health Officer of the former Howell Township Health Department in the 1960’s, remembers when he was “the only Health Officer west of the Parkway.”
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The Local Health Services Act of 1975 rapidly reduced the number of health departments in NJ from 291 to 120 by 1980.
About this time, federal and state laws were also promoting the formation of county health departments because of concerns about the regional nature of new environmental contaminants. Almost one hundred years after the mandate for local boards of health, the County Environmental Health Act of 1977 provided funding for Environmental Health programs in county or regional health departments to control water, air, noise, solid waste and hazardous materials.
The environmental movement, with seminal moments like the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and the Love Canal controversy in 1978, returned health departments to its roots. Eliminating environmental pollution linked disease not with foul odors or miasmas, but with chemicals found in industrial discharges and commercial products.
It is very striking how similar the popular reform efforts that had driven the formation of public health boards one hundred years earlier resembled the grassroots environmental movement and the subsequent creation of federal, state and county environmental health agencies. “The sanitary movement [of the nineteenth century] did not gain momentum until hundreds of volunteer citizens’ groups sprang up throughout the country and overrode vested interests and apathy to push through major reforms “, wrote Duffy in his book The Sanitarians.
Environmental Health regulations would be enforced in New Jersey by the comparatively new Department of Environmental Protection, not the one-hundred year old Department of Health.
RESOURCES
Duffy, J. 1990. The Sanitarians. A History of American Public Health. University of Illinois Press. Urbana and Chicago.
Fulcomer, Mark and Sass, Marcia. Accessed 8/3/13. Board of Health of the State of New Jersey. University Libraries Special Collections New Jersey Health Statistics from 1877 to 2000: An Historical Electronic Compendium of Published Reports. Compiled and Annotated by University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. http://libraries.umdnj.edu/History_of_Medicine/NJHS/statistics.html
League of Women Voters. 1974. Our County – Monmouth. The League.
New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services. 4/2008. A study of New Jersey’s Local Public Health System. Div. of Health Infrastructure Preparedness and Emergency Response. http://www.state.nj.us/health/lh/documents/study_report.pdf
Pfizer Global Pharmaceuticals. 2006. Milestones in Public Health. Pfizer Inc., N.Y. http://www.pfizerpublichealth.com/publications.asp
