TAKE FIVE!

June 08, 2021

Jenny Sanchez:
Hello, I’m Jenny Sanchez. Welcome to Sullivan 180 Presents… Take Five! Our guest today is Jill Hubert Simon from Sullivan County Public Health Services. Jill, thank you for joining me.

Jill Hubert Simon:
Oh, thank you for having me! I’m glad to be here.

Jenny Sanchez:
Could you please introduce yourself, your title, and tell us a little bit more about Public Health?

Jill Hubert Simon:
Sure. So as you already mentioned, my name is Jill Hubert Simon, and I am one of the Public Health Educators for Sullivan County Public Health. So Public Health does a lot of different things. Obviously, right now we’re very busy doing some vaccination clinics, but we do those clinics throughout the year for routine vaccines as well. So, we do that, we run the drug task force out of our Rural Health Network, and of course we do Health Education, which is a big piece of what we try to do to make our community healthier.

Jenny Sanchez:
What kind of services and programs do you specifically offer?

Jill Hubert Simon:
It’s hard to be specific because we do a lot of different things! I know I’ll forget something, but we run routine vaccine clinics, we have nursing services for people who are home bound. I’m going to spend a little time talking about education because that’s what I like to do. For Public Health Education, we do any type of health related outreach and education. We’re always available to do community outreach, to do classes, and we also do NARCAN trainings. We participate in “Freedom from Smoking” trainings, and pretty much anything health-related that the public is interested in: we’re able to go out and provide education and outreach.

Jenny Sanchez:
And as the weather warms up, what about “tick safety”? What would you like the community to know?

Jill Hubert Simon:
My main job, and I guess what people probably best know me for is “the tick check”. Right now is the biggest time for ticks. You know, ticks are around year… they are even here in the winter time. So we always needs to be vigilant. It is important to remember that tick illness is preventable… It’s 100% preventable. We just need to be vigilant. The best thing that we can do is make sure that we’re looking from head to toe on ourselves, our children and our pets, every time we come in from outside. For most cases, it takes a tick 24 to 36 hours to transmit disease. So if we do those tick checks every time, we’re going to find the ticks before they have a chance to make us sick. That’s something that even young kids can do, and it’s really important. We can’t forget our pets because they sometimes will bring ticks into the house, and we really don’t want those to stay in our house! Insect repellants are important for the skin. We can also treat our clothes with Permethrin, which is a tick killer, very easily found in pretty much any store around. And it’s very effective, particularly for people who work outside, or for people who like to do a lot of hiking. It just has to be on your shoes and socks. I do my kids’ shoes when they go to camp and it’s worked pretty well. The guidance is, when we’re going to out, especially hiking, that we wear long pants and long sleeves. So, those are all really easy things that we can do to prevent ourselves from getting sick. I do have to say too that the easiest and most effective way to take a tick off is simply with a pair of tweezers. The thinner the tweezers, the better. We don’t want to burn the tick. We don’t want to put Vaseline or anything else on the tick because the goal is to get the tick off of us. And if it’s feeding on us, we want to remove it as quickly and as safely as possible. And we’re going to remove the tick in a very similar way to taking out a splinter. So we just grabbed it close to the skin, and pull it straight out, without jerking it, because we want to try to get the mouth parts out as well.

Jenny Sanchez:
What can Sullivan County residents do to help Public Health, or help spread the word?

Jill Hubert Simon:
Want residents can do to help is SHARE INFORMATION! We have alot of information out there, and again, if we’re talking about ticks, sharing the information and talking to everybody else: we really do get a lot of ‘word of mouth’. So, we try to get our information out and public health has a lot of great services. Unfortunately we have found that people might not know everything that we have available. If someone in the community has used our services and had a good experience, please let your community know, and let your family and friends know: we want to help and we want to make our community healthy. And we can only do that if we can get our services ‘out there’ and we can get our education ‘out there’. So word of mouth is really important!

Jenny Sanchez:
Can people stay in touch with Public Health?

Jill Hubert Simon:
So we’ve got a lot of ways that you can keep in touch with us. Obviously, you can call us, you can email us. We have a Facebook page, which we’re fairly active on: we try to put a lot of information up on that. We’re also part of the Division of Family Services Instagram page. I see a lot of public health stuff up on Instagram. We also have a website: we’ve got a page for all of our programs, with information and contact information. All that said, Social Media is the easiest way to stay in touch, and that’s the most current information. We try to get healthy tips out there, and information about what might be going on in the community, and programs that we’re running as well.

Jenny Sanchez:
Jill, thank you so much for being here and for sharing about Public Health and ‘tick safety’.

Jill Hubert Simon:
Thank you so much for having me and we really hope that we can stop some tick-borne illness, because that’s the last thing we need after we’ve coming out of the COVID pandemic. So I just remind people to be vigilant with those ‘tick checks’: let’s not let those things make us sick so we can enjoy our time outside!