Phil Brady Named to NCPHD Board of Health
Phil Brady Named to NCPHD Board of Health
El comisionado del condado de Wasco, Phil Brady, nombrado miembro de la Junta de Salud de NCPHD
Wasco County Commissioner Phil Brady, just named to North Central Public Health District’s Board of Health, recently described a time during his years as a missioner in Venezuela when he saw public health in action.
Wasco County Commissioner Phil Brady
While visiting with a doctor, a person came in with diarrhea. “Instead of treating the person, the doctor broke off the interview with me and went to the person’s house to see what was the root cause. Deal with the causes, not just the symptoms,” Brady recounted.
While the health district certainly treats people who come in for reproductive health services, treatment of STIs, and for immunizations, much of the health district’s work is indeed about creating healthy environments to prevent sickness in the first place.
That ranges from creating tobacco-free spaces to ensuring new moms and their kids have good nutrition and connections to resources to ensuring local restaurants are meeting health and safety standards.
Brady was raised in The Dalles, and planned to become a Catholic priest after getting his physics degree from Gonzaga University. But awhile later, he instead became a science teacher, and then married a fellow teacher, Mary Jo Commerford.
Brady taught at several Catholic high schools, and he and Mary Jo and their two daughters served as Catholic missioners in Venezuela for nine years. They moved back to The Dalles, where Brady taught juveniles at the regional jail in The Dalles and most recently taught at The Dalles High School.
He also served on the Board of Trustees of Mid-Columbia Medical Center, giving him valuable insight into health-related issues.
His experience with MCMC was “with medicine, and as the name indicates, public health is about health as opposed to medicine. So I’m interested in how we can both prevent disease and improve our health, and as COVID taught us, protecting ourselves from disease is a community action.”
He also sits on the housing authority board and the Mid-Columbia Community Action Council board, which are directly involved with houselessness. “So the intersection of housing and health is important to me.”
At his swearing in for commissioner, he said his great grandfather settled on the lands of the Cayuse Tribe in John Day country near the Painted Hills, where he raised sheep. Brady acknowledged that while the Cayuse lived sustainably in the area for thousands of years, settlers overgrazed it in decades. His great grandfather died in debt.
“So for me, being a fourth generation Oregonian carries a recognition that my ancestors did not do well either for the natives they displaced, nor for the land they claimed belonged to them,” he said.
He said his dad championed The Dalles Dam in the 1950s, which inundated Celilo Falls, a Native American fishing site. But his mom grew to understand it was “wrong to assume our way of living was more important than their way of being in the world.”
“We are excited to welcome Commissioner Brady to the Board of Health,” said Shellie Campbell, director of NCPHD. “We look forward to the insights he will bring given his life experiences and his concern for the health and wellbeing of the entire community, especially those who have not been well-served in the past.”
To learn more about Brady, you can visit his website, philbradywascoounty.com
(For more information, please visit COVID-19 Vaccine in Oregon, contact North Central Public Health District at (541) 506-2600, visit us on the web at www.ncphd.org or find us on Facebook.)