| Health
Matters
Working toward a Marquette County Miracle
March is one of my favorite months for watching basketball. It’s the one month I turn into a couch potato. Our local sport teams play all winter long, not so much for a winning record, but to get ready for the playoffs. A team can go without a loss for the regular season, but if it loses its first-round game, it’s a lost season. Fans are tough around here.
There have been teams with less than a fifty-percent winning record who have gone far in the playoffs. When March Madness rolls around each year, it seems everyone is talking about which team should be ranked highest for the NCAA tournament. Researchers from a new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded project hope that after this February, everyone will be discussing a different type of rankings—the county health rankings.
For the first time, our “Sick Care System” is being ranked by county in Michigan through a series of health and social variables that impact morbidity (sickness) and mortality (age adjusted death rates). The point of the exercise is not to point fingers, but to jump-start a process to help each county work collaboratively to improve health outcomes.
The current “discussions” on national health care policy are simply an exercise on who pays for health care and how much. It’s darned near universal that people agree “we” are not in the best of shape to avoid expensive chronic disease treatment.
The national release has Marquette County listed in the top ten counties in the State of Michigan—No. 9 out of eighty-three. There are many reasons for our good ranking. A lot of work done by many people and organizations in the county helped improve our rankings. For example, in health care, we rank No. 1. There are two variables that work on this access to health care and the quality of that care.
Organizations such as Medical Care Access Coalition and Rural Health Clinics work to help low income people without insurance get medical care. There can be no denying that what we do spend on medical care in our county is quality care. Now, research backs that up. It’ll even get better with our two hospitals joining forces to work collaboratively. Even end-of-life care is good in Marquette County, with two hospice organizations helping families in need of that service.
Since I work in “prevention,” I like to toot our own horn. We rank No. 10 in health behaviors. The measures here include tobacco and alcohol use. The county is good for low tobacco rates at eighteen percent, not so good on binge drinking at twenty-one percent, the recommended level being twelve percent or less. Our teen pregnancy rate is pretty low as well as our sexually transmitted diseases. Since we rank No. 6 in morbidity (sickness), we’re doing something right compared to the other eighty-three counties in the state.
A lot of people don’t know our “social risk factors” play a role in both mortality and morbidity. Education, employment, income, family and social support and community safety all are quality of life issues in which we do fairly well.
Of course, most of us know intuitively that Marquette County is a great place to live. I’m not a Pollyanna about it; good paying jobs are scarce with too many of our young people having to leave.
But when they do, most find great paying jobs due to the excellent educations they receive from local schools. We hear a lot of the problems in education; we have ours, but all local schools are well above state averages in spite of challenging financial difficulties. Our graduation rate of eighty-eight compares extremely well to our urban counterparts downstate who struggle to “earn” a fifty-percent graduation rate . . .
—George Sedlacek
Recycling for public health
Do you recycle? Do you recycle every day? I’m not talking about separating cardboard, papers, plastics, cans and glass. That type of recycling takes willful and intentional action to reduce the impact household and business waste has on our environment.
I’m talking about something much more passive. Do you wash dishes, take a bath or shower, launder clothes or flush a toilet one or more times a day? If you live or work in a city or township with a public water supply, you recycle. Every time you use drinking water in some way and then send it back down the drain, you start a stream of recycling activity that eventually brings that water back to your faucets.
Wow, modern marvel? Yes, when you consider the numerous restorative encounters that occur throughout the wastewater stream and compare the safe drinking water standards of today to as recent as sixty years ago.
Now that you have been awakened to the prospect of being a person who recycles on a daily basis, perhaps your interest is peaked. Just how does this whole biological, chemical and mechanical process take place? Very carefully, methodically and scientifically.
Before I get into the “How do they do that?”, let’s start with some fun facts to get your mind on the right track:
1. Why is it important to manage the pollutants in the wastewater system?
A. to prevent illness
B. because waste happens
C. to protect the environment
D. a & c
2. When did the City of Marquette begin to convey and treat wastewater?
A. 1920
B. 1941
C. 1953
D. 1979
3. How long does it take wastewater to reach the treatment facility from a home or office one mile away?
A. 10 minutes
B. 22 minutes
C. 1-2 hours
D. depends on the weather
In my quest to find out “How do they do that?” I took a brief road trip to the Marquette Area Wastewater Treatment Plant, located on US-41 South and met Plant Supervisor Tom Asmus.
According to Asmus, “Prior to 1953, about three million gallons per day of Marquette’s untreated domestic and industrial wastewater flowed into Lake Superior at various points along the lakeshore. Those points were concentrated primarily in the lower harbor area. In 1953, the city’s first sewage treatment plant went online along with several sanitary lift stations. The purpose of collection and treatment at that time was to improve public health conditions. Environmental protection was secondary and still is.”
The original treatment processes used simple physical settling processes to treat wastewater partially. Abundant amounts of chlorine gas were dosed to the wastewater to kill pathogens. Environmental protection by wastewater treatment did not really become a major issue until the Clean Water Act of 1972 was enacted by Congress.
Since 1977, in addition to the City of Marquette, the facility has had a contractual agreement to serve both Chocolay and Marquette Township’s wastewater needs. The Wastewater Treatment Plant treats an average of 3.2 million gallons of waste a day and has won several awards from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its excellence in operations.
At first glance, I knew I was at some type of processing place, but it didn’t look or smell like waste. On the contrary, the place was clean and neat . . .
—Leslie Bek
Editor’s Note: Answers 1. D, 2. C, 3. B. To learn more about wastewater recycling, take a virtual tour at www.mqtcty.org
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