EPHRATA — Dr. Alexander Brzezny had a good reason for going into public medicine.

“I grew up in an area which is well known for coal mining and production of steel,” Brzezny said. “The air was very unhealthy and there was a lot of pollution. It was what we call the black heart of the country … I could see firsthand the difficulties of people who were working, and I could see how poor air and bad health habits affected them.”

Brzezny, who grew up in what is now the Czech Republic, was sickly a lot as a child himself, and even confined to a wheelchair for a while, he said. Many of his family worked in the coal and steel industries, but his mother and several other female relatives were nurses, and his uncle was a highly-regarded urologist who had served both in Europe and in Africa. Brzezny himself attended medical school at Masaryk University in the Czech city of Brno, the same city where Gregor Mendel had done groundbreaking experiments in genetics more than 100 years earlier and about 75 miles from the birthplace of Sigmund Freud. It’s the second-largest medical school in the country, Brzezny said.

“As you can imagine, genetics was one of the most (important) subjects at the medical school because of Gregor Mendel,” Brzezny said. “And not surprisingly, psychiatry was the other.”

Brzezny graduated from Masaryk University in 1996, according to his biography on WebMD. After that, he said, he went to the University of Kansas in Wichita and studied with some scientists from the National Cancer Institute. He came away with a master’s degree from the public health program at the University of Kansas, he said.

“(Public health) was always my parallel interest, but my main interest was internal medicine,” he said. “I took a lot of surgery classes when I was in medical school, thinking that one day I might be a cardiothoracic surgeon, but when the opportunity came to work on cancer research and observe how that’s done in the United States, I used that opportunity.”

Brzezny has been the health officer for the Grant County Health District for 25 years, he said, and for Adams County for 10 years. He’s board-certified in family medicine and spends more than half of his time in clinical work at Columbia Basin Hospital in Ephrata. But his public health work came to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was a challenging time for public health in general,” Brzezny said. “I would not single myself out as having particularly a more difficult time. (I was) prepared for that in the years prior, particularly around 2005, 2006 when we were concerned about an avian influenza pandemic in the United States. And subsequently, we had a little pandemic globally in 2009, H1N1, which didn’t become as well remembered or as deadly. But in public health, we always prepare for the next emergency.”

There were 33 cases of H1N1, also called swine flu, in Grant County in 2009 and 2010, according to the Washington Department of Health, one of them fatal. Statewide, there were 1,667 cases and 98 fatalities. Washington was better off than some states; the Centers for Disease Control estimates that swine flu was responsible for more than 12,000 American deaths.

Grant County fared better than some places during the COVID-19 pandemic as well. Data from the GCHD and the Washington Department of Health indicate that only 0.9% of COVID-related deaths in Washington were in Grant County, which held about 1.9% of the state’s total population. Similar data was not available for Adams County.

Brzezny credited the staff at GCHD for their response to the pandemic.

“Public health employs a lot of people,” he said. “Thankfully, we have very important and dedicated staff. I may be (involved) in a lot of work of being prepared, but it is not often me who does that work. It is the people who are behind the scenes and (are) often underrecognized and underreported. Medicine is not a solo endeavor; it is a team sport.”

In both public health and clinical work, Brzezny said, it’s the chance of improving lives that makes him go to work every day.

“Sometimes it is the smallest of things that make the biggest difference,” he said. “I get up every morning with the hope that I can affect the life of one person in a way that’s going to be meaningful to their loved ones. If I can do that in a way … that achieves even half of that, then it’s worth getting up in the morning.”