Who’s making this?

Daniella (She/her)

Hi! I'm Daniella Barreto, your host on Public Health is Dead. I'm a longtime public health advocate with a background in epidemiology and health science. I'm also an award-winning podcast producer.

Public Health is Dead exists for the simple reason that institutional public health is failing us. It's never been great for the communities I'm from and we all need a different plan.

To build this podcast I've interviewed heavy hitters in the field and beyond, spoken to regular people resisting the impacts of our leaders' failures, scoured through research, histories and myths, and spent countless late nights stitching the pieces together. Public Health is Dead is the inevitable culmination of my education, skills, and life experiences and I’m excited to share it with the world.

I want Public Health is Dead to be an accessible shareable and informative public health resource (that’s also kind of fun!). I hope it can connect the people who want to choose a better world and help light a path out of the wreckage around us in its own little way. Thanks for being here!

-Daniella 💀💚🩷

You can reach me at: daniella [at] publichealthisdead dot com for collaboration, commiseration, or collusion.

P.S. There's also a small crew (the Skeleton Crew) helping the show out with pieces of production like music and mixing, admin, guest curation, fact checking, and content development. They are credited in the show notes of each episode they helped make!

  • If you want to know more, read on or listen to Episode Zero, where I introduce public health, myself and the podcast!

    I live in unceded and occupied xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory, aka Vancouver, BC. I went to school for population and public health (MSc.) & health science (BSc.) at UBC and SFU. I have spent time working in public health research, digital comms, and strategic planning, as well as activism/organizing/campaigning/general troublemaking. I love art and design and I’m also a photographer. I'm Black, queer, and a first-generation immigrant who grew up in Zimbabwe, briefly in the UK, and, of course, so-called Canada.

    I have been making podcasts since 2017 and have won multiple awards and recognition for my work including for Public Health is Dead. I created, hosted, and produced a narrative podcast series on surveillance/AI, anti-Black racism, and policing for Amnesty International Canada. I help produce a film & TV podcast for Indigenous actors. The first show I ever worked on was a social justice podcast with a collective of "emerging leaders" in Montreal. This is where I met Snoop Dogg and got him to talk about cannabis legalization but that is a wild story for another time. (I also do freelance podcasting work. If you want to know more about that and/or hire me head here.)

    In 2020 I had One Hit Tweet about anti-Black racism, COVID, and public health and that's kind of my whole thing in a nutshell. My research and activism background is in HIV and systemic violence, anti-Black racism, sexual health, and 2SLGBTQ+ issues. I've done public health work from running inclusive sexual health workshops in high schools, to harm reduction outreach at Wreck Beach in the back of a van, to conducting and publishing peer-reviewed epidemiology research.

    Watching the scale and severity of SARS2 unfold and the failure of our leaders to address it made me want to do something about it in my own way. Now more than half a decade into the COVID pandemic, witnessing the growing normalization of mass death and eugenics, I decided to make something to counter the denial and fatalism I see. (Patricia Hill Collins, with a smile on her face, once called me a “renegade” and I take that honour seriously). This is an unorthodox public health communications project to try something new. Essentially my view is: if we can’t have our health then what future are we fighting for?

    With Public Health is Dead, I hope to bring back some of the subversive spark that attracted me to public health in the first place, increase our collective knowledge, contribute a body of work that is useful to the field, and help support communities that deserve better. We keep us safe.

    Everything is connected and public health is connected to everything. We truly have life or death decisions to make. So let's get to it.

SHOW CREDITS

Public Health is Dead is an independent podcast created, produced, written, edited, and hosted by Daniella Barreto. Varied additional production support, including fact checking, editing, and sound design, is credited in each episode’s shownotes and corresponding blog page.