Health Crusader Takes Aim At Junk Food

After ducking for safety in wartime Sarajevo and battling malaria in the Colombian jungle, New Haven’s new health chief is taking on a new challenge — helping kids stave off obesity.

Mario Garcia started work last week as the city’s new health director, with a salary of $105,000. He takes charge of the city’s health department, which has been without a permanent director since February, when Bill Quinn left after 21 years as health chief to take a job in Bridgeport. Garcia will supervise 100 staff members and a budget of $17 million.

The native Colombian comes to the job with 20 years of public health service, which has taken him through at least six countries and one war zone. For the past seven years, he’s been working at the Connecticut Department of Public Health. In an interview on his fourth day on the job, he said he aims to focus on helping children develop healthy habits, so they can avoid obesity.

The new effort will debut Monday when the health department teams up with the school district to roll out a ​“Healthy Checklist” for keeping students healthy and happy as they return to school.

Garcia, who’s 51, showed up to an interview Thursday in rimless glasses, a graying beard and an intricately patterned yellow and green tie. He spoke passionately about his start in the public health profession, which took root in the Colombian rainforest 27 years ago.

His career path began in 1983. He had just graduated from medical school in Colombia. As part of his medical certification, he was required to work for six months in a rural hospital in eastern Columbia, in the Amazon. The hospital was remote. When he arrived, he got his first up-close look at malaria. With proper treatment, the disease is not supposed to be fatal, he said.

“We were seeing people dying with malaria,” he said. ​“We were convinced that that should not happen.”

Garcia and his coworkers set up a malaria prevention and treatment program. They taught people how to defend themselves against the disease by installing window screens and making environmental changes to cut down exposure to mosquitoes.

In the first year of the program, the team of doctors and health workers treated 7,000 patients for malaria, he said.

“We saved a lot of lives,” Garcia said.

After serving his six-month requirement at the site, Garcia didn’t want to leave. He stayed on for three and a half more years. The work was exhausting, but rewarding, he said. The project ended up changing his life path: He had originally planned to be a surgeon.

“Working in those circumstances makes you reflect a lot” on life priorities, he said. He began to think about ​“whether I wanted to be the surgeon that I had originally envisioned” — or go into public health.

Garcia chose the latter. He headed to England, where he earned a masters degree in community health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. For the next six years, he threw himself into international humanitarian work, coordinating medical outreach in Brazil, Nicaragua and Belize through the group Doctors Without Borders.

That work took him to wartime Sarajevo during the Bosnian War in 1993 – 94. He served as director of humanitarian assistance, bringing medical aid to villages whose doctors had fled. It was a dangerous time to be there. While he stayed safe, he recalled hearing gunfire at night.

“I never was shot at, but I always knew I could [have] at any time,” he said.

During that era, he’d travel to Sarajevo in a cargo plane. The doctors would jump out wearing bullet-proof vests and helmets, and rush into armored cars, he said. When they got into the city, they’d rush from the armored car into a bunker where the doctors were based, he said.

After six years with Doctors Without Borders, Garcia and his wife decided to move to the Connecticut. His wife Hilary, who’s from the Farmington area, had been following him around around the world — he said it was time for him to follow her, to a job in New York City. Garcia and his wife moved to New Haven in 2000. The following year, he enrolled in the master’s program at Yale’s School of Public Health.

For the last seven years, he’s been putting his studies to work at the state Department of Public Health, where he worked as the public health services manager. There, he helped put together emergency management programs — such as how to hand out meds in case of a pandemic — using a new round of federal terrorism grants. He also tackled tobacco cessation and promoted nutrition and physical activity among people at risk for obesity.

Since adults’ habits are hard to change, much of the emphasis in public health interventions tends to be with children, Garcia said.

Garcia said he aims to continue that emphasis in his new job in New Haven. He said his goals include improving access to fresh produce — especially after Shaw’s grocery left town—and combating childhood obesity by educating families about junk food.

Some solutions may be to set up after-school student gardening classes, or adding more nutrition to the school curriculum, he said.

“We want to create a wave of awareness,” he said.

Garcia and his wife, Hilary, live in New Haven with their two school-aged kids, Juan Sebastian and Juliana.

While it won’t take him back to the jungle, Garcia’s new job already has him tracking mosquitoes again — this time for the West Nile virus. To answer a reporter’s question, he pulled out a mobile phone and quickly looked up the latest update: No Connecticut humans had contracted the virus this year.

A day later, on Friday, a New Haven resident tested positive for West Nile, state officials said.