James Garrow, the city’s director of Digital Public Health, noted the Lead and Healthy Homes Program “is actually driven by the presence of children, not the simply the presence of lead in the environment.”
In other words, our unscientific findings at City Hall don’t exactly mesh with the focus of that effort as it “does not focus on work environments.”
Heath Dept. spokesperson James Garrow told Billy Penn the city does already translate some documents, on a case-by-case basis.
These documents are usually grouped with the English documents on the department website, he said. Per Garrow, it takes two to three business days to translate a document to Spanish, via the city’s translation vendor, Geneva Worldwide.
That’s still unclear. While city officials have given the green light for a facility to open in Philadelphia, they still need to find a private operator to run it. James Garrow, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, told TIME that some parties have expressed interest, but declined to name them.
“We had personal effects in our building going back to the early 1970s,” explained James Garrow of the city’s Department of Public Health. “This has obviously led to a crisis of storage space.”
In Philadelphia, the number of autopsies at the medical examiner’s office has risen about 20 percent since 2013, from 2,489 to 3,018 last year, said department spokesman James Garrow. That required a doubling in the budget for supplies and materials — gowns, safety equipment, and body bags — and the hiring of a new assistant medical examiner. The city doesn’t break out individual costs. “We’re too big an operation,” Garrow said.
“We’ve seen an increase in syphilis infections in Philly, but the demographics that we’re seeing don’t match up with what Oklahoma City is purported to be,” said James Garrow, Philadelphia Department of Public Health spokesman.
“Inspections are done on a rolling calendar schedule based upon fiscal year, but that is upset by complaints,” Digital Public Health Director James Garrow told Billy Penn, “which obviously upsets any type of hyper-planned out calendar, and rightfully so as we take complaints very seriously.”
Spokesman James Garrow of the Philadelphia Department of Health said Friday that 7-year-old Sebastian Gerena died of “anomalous origin of the left coronary artery,” a condition that researchers say can lead to sudden death among the young.
A spokesman for the city Health Department declined to release the cause of death yesterday, citing privacy issues. “We saw nothing in the autopsy to suggest this is an infectious disease or condition,” James Garrow said.
Garrow said that, absent family, an unrelated third party must show some connection with the deceased in life – not just an objection to the way they died.
He said the office would hold unclaimed remains for 10 years, although they would be cremated once the staff exhausted efforts to find relatives. After 10 years, Garrow said, cremated remains are buried at local cemeteries.
Jackson had gone missing earlier this year. When an unidentified woman died in a Philadelphia hospital on July 20th, authorities matched the body to Jackson’s missing-person’s report. Jackson had been dealing with drug and mental health problems, and her family had been trying to find her. Her son saw the pictures of the body, and positively identified the body as Jackson.
“If someone comes in and they’re a family member and say, ‘That’s my mom,’ that’s generally good enough,” Philadelphia Department of Health spokesman James Garrow said.
The mix-up came as a surprise since Jackson’s son identified the body.
“The gold standard here [for identifying a body] is visual identification by a family member,” so the son’s identification was taken as fact, Philadelphia Health Department spokesman James Garrow told The Huffington Post.
A Philly Horizon House worker and Jackson’s son, Travis Jackson, 30, identified her from a photo. A medical examiner signed a death certificate and released what they thought was Jackson’s body.
“If someone comes in and they’re a family member and say, ‘That’s my mom,’ that’s generally good enough,” city Health Department spokesman James Garrow said.
The medical examiner determined the woman died of heat stroke, signed a death certificate and released the body to the family, Philadelphia Department of Health spokesman James Garrow said.
“If someone comes in and they’re a family member and say, ‘That’s my mom,’ that’s generally good enough,” Garrow said.
A representative of the Philadelphia Health Department says all proper procedures were followed by workers and, with two people, including a family member, identifying her, it was following protocol to release the body.