NEW YORK — For seven years, Dr. Thomas Frieden has been the nagging conscience of the nation’s biggest city, the man who made sure New Yorkers couldn’t smoke in bars or eat french fries cooked in artery-clogging trans fats.
Now, the city’s health commissioner will take his crusade against unhealthy living national as the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
President Barack Obama announced Friday that he has picked the 48-year-old Frieden to lead the public health agency, where he will be faced with immediate decisions on how to deal with the swine flu, including whether to produce a vaccine. Frieden also might play a role in health care reform.
The selection reunites Frieden with an agency where he worked as an infectious-disease detective at the beginning of his career.
New York’s health commissioner is not usually a household name, but many New Yorkers got to know Frieden after his appointment in 2002, when he began a series of not-so-gentle campaigns to get the city to live healthier.
Frieden is unapologetic. In a 2004 editorial in the American Journal of Public Health, he chided most public health agencies for being “asleep at the switch” on chronic disease.
It is unclear how Frieden’s approach will play in the rest of America. His support of needle exchange programs and condom distribution to help prevent the spread of AIDS (he distributed tens of millions of free condoms, proudly stamped with the city’s NYC logo and the slogan “Get Some!”) might not sit well with conservatives. And civil libertarians have chafed at his attempts to force changes in Americans’ diets.
Frieden’s record
• In 2003, Frieden pushed through a ban on smoking in almost all workplaces. Big increases in cigarette taxes followed. Smokers were outraged, but the backlash was short-lived. About 350,000 fewer adult New Yorkers smoke now than in 2002.
• Fast-food companies all over the country had to change their recipes after Frieden pushed through a ban on heart-damaging trans fats in New York City restaurant food. The city also began requiring thousands of chain restaurants to post the calorie content of their foods.
• After graduating from Columbia University’s medical school, he worked in the CDC’s epidemiologic intelligence service, then led New York’s attempt to contain the spread of drug-resistant TB in the mid-1990s.
The Associated Press
