Black faces similar challenges as predecessor a century ago

During a series of emergency health board meetings in July, Lincoln County Public Health Officer Dr. Brad Black bore the brunt of residents’ anger with new pandemic-related restrictions.

Black, who heads up the Center for Asbestos Related Disease after years of treating residents as a local doctor, took the attacks on his competency, experience and credibility in stride. Public health, he said later, has always been controversial.

“Public health started and really developed authority in the days when we had no sanitation,” Black said in an interview late last month. “It was the biggest issue of the day. We stopped people — we took away their freedom to defecate and urinate in the street.”

Much of the present day ire surrounds Gov. Steve Bullock’s July 15 mask mandate for counties with more than four active cases of COVID-19. Medical officials across the country have adopted face coverings as a way to slow the transmission of the novel coronavirus.

Black tends to view directives like the mask mandate as a way to both cut the spread of the virus and reinforce healthy behaviors people will need to maintain in the winter months. That includes regular hand washing, staying home when feeling unwell and wearing a mask in public areas.

The coronavirus spreads much more easily in crowded indoor spaces. During the summer months, it’s easier to avoid those places, Black said. Not so much during the long, cold winter.

“We’re trying to help the public do the things that are so critical for the community,” Black said. “Our best tool right now is not as convenient as they like, but it works.”

Black began hammering home the importance of wearing a mask well before Bullock required them. It’s not the first time in Libby’s history that a public health officer has attempted to persuade people to act in the community’s best interests.

During the 1918 influenza epidemic, Dr. J. H. Morrison was tasked with overseeing Libby’s public health response. In October 1918, The Western News reported that the town had been ordered closed and people warned against gathering in groups.

Schools were emptied, church services canceled and even “the moving picture house has been dark,” the newspaper reported in an eerie similarity to 2020.

Children needed letters from their parents before taking to the city streets as the “benefit derived from closing school shall not be destroyed by the failure of the children to obey the order to stay home,” according to newspaper accounts.

More “stringent” rules were announced in the Oct. 31 edition of The Western News. No more than five people at a time were allowed in bank lobbies, sections of retail stores and the post office. Saloon patrons were given just five minutes at the bar.

By that date, 30 cases of the influenza had been reported in the Libby area. Morrison urged residents to follow the rules.

More than anything else, the health officer pleaded with residents to stay home if they were sick or still recovering from the flu. He told The Western News that, “from my experience in the last 10 days … I believe the worst fault the people have is getting out of bed before they should.”

These sick residents were resuming their normal routine, Morrison said, and “too many have gone out on the streets still coughing and spitting.”

Black broke into laughter upon hearing that account.

“It seems like naturally people wouldn’t do things like that, but they do,” he said.

Reacting to public health regulations as a loss of rights is an understandable response, Black said. During the series of health board meetings last month, critics of Bullock’s mask mandate described it as unconstitutional, an example of government overreach and a loss of liberty.

“What gives you the authority to tell me what to do with my body?” asked Heather Handy, a Eureka-based business owner and critic of the mask mandate, during a July 16 meeting.

Throughout the pandemic, Black has cited the county’s large at-risk population, including the elderly and many of his patients at the CARD clinic, who suffer from asbestos-related disease. Were the coronavirus to move unchecked through the population, it likely will spread to those communities, he has warned.

“You call it a loss of freedom, we call it public health,” he said. “It’s just hard to get through that.”

It’s not clear what, if any, resistance Morrison met to his orders. The newspaper reminded residents that failure to report new cases of the influenza carried a “heavy” penalty.

As with today, many compared handling the pandemic to waging a war on the offending strain of illness. In 1918, the U.S. also had mobilized to the defeat the central powers in World War I. Preventing the spread of influenza was painted as a patriotic act. At the time, the flu was laying low soldiers preparing to head to European battlefields.

“By helping to spread it, you are positively aiding the enemy,” Morrison told The Western News.

Like Black, who has weighed whether to allow popular public events to go forward as planned in recent months, Morrison was petitioned to allow gatherings. In the Nov. 4 edition of The Western News, it was announced that the health officer had given the children of Libby permission to hold a victory parade as the war wound down.

And just as today, masks in 1918 were controversial. In late November of that year, The Western News reported on the return of Dr. W .F. Cogswell of the Montana Board of Health from a meeting of U.S. and Canadian medical professionals in Chicago. The “flu mask,” reported the newspaper, was deemed worthless even as it had been shown to work at a Boston hospital when worn properly by nurses.

Quarantines, too, were denounced as worthless unless “rigidly enforced.”

And in another echo of today, the attendees all agreed to give their all to finding a vaccine or cure for the flu.

“They believe that the influenza will continue probably through the winter and may return next year,” Cogswell told reporters. “The medical fraternity, the bacteriologists and scientists, are bending every effort toward finding a preventative or an absolute cure for the mysterious malady.”