Ingham County’s new health chief brings a global background

Adenike Shoyinka decided to become a medical doctor so she could follow in her relatives’ footsteps. 

“I had a few people in my family who were physicians, and I liked what they did, they inspired me to study medicine,” Shoyinka said.  “It was something that I was just drawn to.  I really love it.”

She also was drawn to public health. Two weeks ago, she took over from Linda Vail as Ingham County’s medical health officer. As the leader of the county’s Health Department, she oversees a $50 million annual budget, nearly 400 employees and a network of health centers.

“I did a lot of clinical practice for many years in infectious diseases and internal medicine,” Shoyinka, 47, said.

“The opportunity to be able to talk to the patient one-on-one and treat them one-on-one is very satisfying and is important work,” she said about being a doctor in general.

“But being able to do it on a population-wide level is even more so, because you can treat people earlier and prevent disease in people much earlier.”

“I always had a big interest in how public health intersects with clinical medicine,” she added. “Some of that might have been as a result of having a broad overview of global health.”

That global view comes naturally. A native of Nigeria, she has worked in Ethiopia, South Africa and several places in the United States. She earned her medical degree in Nigeria, trained in internal medicine at Harlem Hospital at Columbia University and completed an infectious disease fellowship at Wayne State University/Henry Ford Health System. She completed a preventive medicine residency and holds a master’s degree from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. 

As the Health Department’s medical director since 2019, Shoyinka’s background in infectious disease helped her and Vail deal with COVID-19 when the pandemic struck in 2020.

Shoyinka said Vail “realized early realized early on is how important keeping the population of the community informed is as a part of our response. And that didn’t happen everywhere. She did a really good job with that. I with the rest of my team are committed to continuing the practice of keeping our community informed” as well. 

As the U.S. prepares to end the coronavirus health emergency in May, Shoyinka said the community is at a low community transmission level now, as are hospitalizations and deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Ingham County was averaging 22 COVID cases a day, none resulting in death, as of Friday (Feb. 24), The New York Times reported. That compares to 907 deaths and 84,347 cases overall in Ingham County.

Still, cases are up in Ingham County by 18% in the previous two weeks, the Times reported. The Times also found that as infections decline among other age groups, the elderly remain particularly vulnerable — perhaps as a result of fewer precautions by younger people.  

“Making sure resources are available and that the populations that we’re talking about are aware of how to access them” is paramount, Shoyinka said.

“If an elderly person is vaccinated, they are less likely to get really sick and be hospitalized,” she said.

Another tool is treatment within the first few days of illness, which reduces the severity and chances of being hospitalized, she said.

“These are key ways of protecting them so that they can function in society, unless you put them in a bubble and keep them at home,” she said, adding:

“The average elderly person has multiple chronic medical problems, even if it’s just reduced mobility. Maybe they’re just slower, having a little bit of arthritis. So they need to be out and moving. They need to be interacting in the community. They need to go out for their doctor appointments.”

Shoyinka’s priorities include working to limit not just COVID but a host of conditions, such as influenza, respiratory, enterovirus, rhinovirus, respiratory syncytial virus and HIV. She also hopes to strengthen the existing public health workforce and rebuild programs such immunizations, and WIC, which helps provide nutrition to women, infants and children. 

“We have our HIV/STI clinics, where we screen and treat for sexually transmitted infections, HIV and provide prevention, resources, tools, resources, information for the community at large,” she said. 

She said it’s important to look at substance use disorder, not just in terms of addiction but also other complications including consequent infections and of course all the social implications. She recalled a particular group of patients with skin infections that resulted in endocarditis — a bad heart infection.

“In a lot of those cases, it happens in the setting of people who have opioid use disorder.”

Referring to substance use disorder, she said, “We talk about what that means in terms of their families and how it affects them socially. But then, clinically, you can have significant life-threatening effects not just in the setting of an overdose but in the setting of infections. So, I always think a lot about that progression of disease in that space. Bloodstream infections are horrible.”

Shoyinka cited mental health as one of her top concerns for public health in the county as a whole.

“The resources are just not enough for the volume of the mental health issues that we have as a society. That needs to be considered as part of our conversations about violence and trauma in general,” she said.

The mass shooting at Michigan State University has put added strain on Ingham County’s collective mental health.

“Our community right now is mourning deeply because of the shooting,” she said. “It was tragic. And there’s a lot of conversation about how we respond so that it doesn’t happen again.”

She hopes that the community can move forward and “move the needle in terms of prevention.”

To address the shooting, she said, she needs to hear from the community to see what it needs.

“There’s no point in me saying, ‘Here, take a cup of tea’ when you don’t like tea. Right? You say, ‘I don’t drink tea, I only drink coffee.’ And I don’t have coffee, but I’m saying to you to drink tea. It doesn’t make any sense.”