Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 2, 1990 TAG: 9003023107
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: HINTON, W.VA. LENGTH: Long
So there were some red faces at the state capital in Charleston when sanitarian Stephen Trail wrote to the Soviet Embassy - along with those of the United Kingdom, France and Japan, and the United Nations World Health Organization - asking for assistance.
"They're embarrassed," Trail said of the publicity generated by his letters. "But you know something? They're embarrassed at what we did, but what they should be embarrassed about is babies dying and senior citizens' death rates and our disease rate."
He said Summers County suffers from many of the same problems that plague Third World nations, and should similarly be eligible for aid.
The county has an abundance of retirees and people on fixed incomes. Since the 1950s, its economy has gone downhill with the fortunes of coal and loss of rail traffic, and it also is losing its young people who must seek jobs elsewhere.
"We were told to seek novel avenues of funding by the state," Trail said. "And we did."
"It was never a publicity stunt," said county health nurse Beverley Carter, a Clifton Forge, Va., native. "We were, first off, informing our public that we were being cut back . . . and things just kind of started going from there."
They tried the county, the city of Hinton, the state legislature, eight private foundations, members of Congress and President Bush's office, she said. "We feel that we followed the proper chain of command."
The Summers County Health Department budget had gone from $106,000 for the 1987 fiscal year to $92,694 in 1988 and $60,000 in 1989. This year, facing a financial crunch of its own, the state cut the county back to $50,524.
"They said we needed to get this matched by local funding. There is no local funding," said health clerk Brenda Plumley, the only other department employee.
The county and city of Hinton once had helped, but financial constraints have caught up with them, too.
"Our county is just virtually bankrupt," Carter said. An Appalachian Regional Commission infant-mortality grant expired a few years ago.
At one point, with $4,200 in bills, the department was down to its last 13 cents.
"I've been here 18 years, and this is the first time that I've had to let a bill go at the end of the month," Plumley said in late February. "They were threatening to cut off our electricity, our telephone and all that. So they [the state] said they would send us a check to pay those bills, but we haven't received anything yet, so they're still unpaid."
Also, Carter said, the state cutback is forcing the department to discontinue blood-pressure, diabetes, Pap smear and breast examination clinics. "When you look at the statistics, you'll see why I'm so upset that we had to cut those services. . . . If anything, we should have been adding more services instead of taking them away."
State health statistics for 1983 to 1987, the most recent available, show Summers County as first among all 55 counties in West Virginia in deaths because of obstructive pulmonary disease. It is second in diabetes, fourth in breast cancer, 14th in heart disease and generally above the national average in several other categories.
"When I do the blood-pressure clinic, I take the opportunity to educate and counsel. . . . To me, the whole goal of public health is prevention and education," Carter said. "So I contend that, when we were doing the blood pressure clinic, we were preventing heart attacks, we were preventing strokes."
Trail said the foreign aid inquiries were a method of getting the state's attention, "like taking a 2-by-4 and slapping a mule in the face. . . . We haven't made application for foreign aid. We wrote letters asking what the process was, basically."
The publicity generated headlines and landed Trail on radio talk shows where he mentioned statistics involving infants.
"I happened to mention that the United States is 20th in the world in infant mortality," he said. "That seemed to hit a national nerve, babies dying."
That generated calls from such outlets as Larry King and ABC-TV's "Good Morning, America."
"We got all this publicity, not seeking it. We never even expected it to leave Charleston," he said. "Who knows where this may lead?"
Trail, a 42-year-old West Virginia native who has spent half his life in the public health field, holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Radford University and is in a University of Virginia doctoral program.
"We're all bureaucrats and we've been through this a long time," he said. "We're posturing."
Nobody seriously expects the three employees to land any aid from a foreign government, but they already have had some successes.
A woman from Tokyo sent a contribution to the department. The Diabetes Resource Center in California sent $70 worth of diabetes-testing supplies, which will allow blood-glucose testing to continue through June. An $8,000 grant from Kellogg Foundation announced near the end of February will pay for three years of study on health problems in Summers County.
Meanwhile, Trail is finding himself besieged by reporters and television crews for his "novel" approach to fund-raising.
"What do you do? When you don't have a budget, you can't operate," he said with a shrug. "We absolutely don't have anywhere else to go."
SUMMERS, W.VA.
RANKING AMONG 55 COUNTIES IN STATE
1st in chronic lung disease
2nd in instances of diabetes
4th in breast cancer
9th in low birth weighti
14th in heart disease
26th in infant mortality
by CNB