Who’s making this?
Photo of Daniella by Phoebe Nezil
Daniella (She/her)
Hi! I'm Daniella Barreto. I’m 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.
I’ve poured a lot into producing this show and I’m so excited to share it with you. To build this podcast I've interviewed giants in the field and beyond, spoken to regular people resisting the impacts of our leaders' failures, scoured through myths and histories of public health, and spent countless late nights editing, mixing, and stitching the pieces together.
I hope Public Health is Dead is an informative and entertaining podcast to connect the people who want to choose a different world, adds something useful to the field of public health, and increases our collective knowledge. I hope this show brings us together and helps light a path forward in its own way. I can't wait to meet you!
-Daniella 💀
P.S. There's also a small crew helping the show out with pieces of production like music composition, admin, guest curation, fact checking, and content development. They are credited in the show notes of each episode they helped make!
More About Me.
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 stolen Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh territory, aka Vancouver, BC. I went to school for population and public health & health science at UBC and SFU (MSc., BSc.). I have spent time working in public health research, digital comms, and strategic planning, as well as activism/organizing/campaigning/general troublemaking. I'm a podcast producer and have been making podcasts since 2017. I created, hosted, and produced a narrative podcast series on surveillance, anti-Black racism, and policing for a global nonprofit. I currently help produce an award-winning 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 story for another time).
All of the podcasts I have produced (including this one!) have been featured in Apple Podcasts’ New & Noteworthy curation. Two have made their home page as an "Editors’ Choice" and "Emerging Voices" selection, and Public Health is Dead climbed to the #1 Science spot on the Apple Podcasts Canada charts the week of its debut.
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 publishing peer-reviewed epidemiology research. I'm Black, queer and an immigrant currently based in so-called Canada. In my current day job I'm a strategist at an equity-focused organization that tries to make social impact workplaces suck less.
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. Approaching 5 years of the COVID pandemic and the growing normalization of mass death and eugenics, I decided to make something to counter the denial and fatalism I see.
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, contribute a body of work that is useful to the field, and help support communities that deserve better. This show is the inevitable culmination of my education, skills, and life experiences and I’m excited to share it with the world.
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.