Help with Health – Tips for staying safe this summer

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, July 15, 2026

Public health is the hidden arm of medicine that deals with prevention is how Dr. John Bausher, the health officer for Grays Harbor County, succinctly describes public health.

Upon which Mike McNickle, the public health director, adds, “From the moment you wake up to the time you go to bed, there’s public health interventions, either preventative or actual active interventions, going on. From the time you take a shower in the morning, your water supply has been checked by public health, either state, local or federal. The food you eat has been inspected. The driving speed limit of 55 is a public health intervention. The seat belt you’re using in your car, that’s a public health intervention.”

For Grays Harbor County residents, programs within the Public Health Department are responsible for preventative or active public health interventions. Restaurant inspections and checking the water supply are the responsibility of the Healthy Environments programs, while monitoring of diseases and immunization is under Healthy People programs.

To make visible the work of the Public Health Department staff, The Daily World is starting a new column to highlight preventative public health interventions. For this debut column, Public Health staff discussed tips to safely enjoy summer.

“Summer in general, 4th of July included, is the time when people are out interacting with the environment more, because we don’t get very many months to do that, like we do in the summer,” said Jeff Nelson, the healthy environment director. “It certainly increases the need to be mindful of what those risks are.”

What follows is our conversation edited for length and clarity.

Summer Travel

Lena Stoddard with Healthy People programs: If you’re looking at international travel, there are specific travel vaccines that need to be taken care of to go into certain countries. You can consult with your local pharmacist to determine what vaccines you need. For some vaccines, you need two or three doses, so you want to make sure that you’re planning for that.

To check what vaccines you’re up to date on or missing, you can follow up with your provider or go on the Washington Immunization Registry for your vaccines. (https://myirmobile.com/)

For domestic travel, know where the hotspots of different concerns might be; the hot topic right now is measles. Department of Health has a map that shows what’s going on, and they have a communicable disease data page, which is really cool. (https://doh.wa.gov/data-and-statistical-reports/washington-tracking-network-wtn/communicable-disease-data/dashboard)

Emma Krause with Healthy People programs: If you are traveling internationally, Washington State Department of Health has a great landing page where you go for the immunizations. You go to the section that’s applicable to you, and then there is another link to the CDC travelers page where you can put in the country you’re traveling to, and it will tell you the immunization information that you need to know and also what to do when you get home and are there any travel advisories for that location. (https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/immunization/immunization-travelers)

It’s a really great jumping off point so that when you do visit your primary care provider or a travel clinic at Safeway, you’ve got all the information that you need to give to them so that they can help you.

It’s batty batty batty bat season

Stoddard: Bats are coming out because all the bugs are out and that’s their primary food source. And we’re seeing them because it’s lighter longer. They might end up in your house or you might see them on the ground. A couple things to remember is that in our area bats are the only reservoir for rabies, and rabies is very uncommon in our area; it’s more prevalent in the eastern United States.

Call public health to see if you’ve had an exposure — a scratch, a bite, anything where their saliva could enter your body. And do not pick up a bat with your bare hands, wear gloves.

Recreate safely outdoors

Water and food safety

Debby Barrett with the Healthy People programs: This is the time where we can go out and enjoy the outside. Giardia, also known as beaver fever, is usually a little bit bigger this time of year, and it’s in the streams and waterways. It can cause some GI distress and pretty severe dehydration. Typically, you’ll pass it on its own; just do supportive care such as drink lots of fluids. In other cases, you would take antibiotics.

Bausher: If someone has giardia and they don’t have good hand-washing techniques and they make you food, like a salad, you can get giardia. The symptoms are similar norovirus but more protracted. Norovirus symptoms are usually 24 or 48 hours. Giardia symptoms can be weeks. Bottom line is wash your hands and filter your water.

McNickle: Some practical things on a picnic: Make sure your hot foods are hot and your cold foods stay cold. If you don’t control your foods or handle them properly, don’t wash your hands or don’t use the grill correctly, that is where we see a lot of increase in foodborne illnesses in the summertime.

Bausher: If you don’t know the source of the food when you go to a picnic, only eat hot food so you can mitigate the risk of getting a foodborne disease or infection. When things sit out for an hour or two, that increases the risk for growing bacteria, so keep it cold.

For shellfish, the summer months increase risk of becoming sick from vibrio bacteria, which causes bloody diarrhea. At low tide, the shellfish are incubating in the sun, which increases the presence of the bacteria. Commercial growers have requirements that at certain temperatures, they have to get the shellfish and put them on ice within certain times.

Nelson: The ‘when in doubt, throw it out’ moniker we use for food is used for water — when in doubt, stay out. Harmful algae blooms in fresh water can look like spilt paint; it’s so vibrant. If you see something like that, stay out. Wind and other factors can have a major impact on where those blooms settle or where the toxins are. The only way to really know for sure if a bloom is toxic is the test.

If we have freshwater bodies where we know blooms occur in the summer, we monitor them and take reports from the public. We post signs that are advisory or educational, and we have the capacity to increase the warning level. The Elma Ponds in east county can experience blooms, and Ocean Shores has a vast network of waterways.

Recreation and Water safety

McNickle: Public health is super good at prevention, so the preventative side are things like sunscreen. Put sunscreen on if you’re going to go outside and it’s sunny, because melanoma is on the rise. Make sure the sunscreen has a sun protection factor that is an appropriate number and is a high-quality sunscreen.

The other big one is water safety. If you don’t know how to swim, don’t go on the river or a lake. When you’re at the beach, don’t turn your back on the waves because of the sneaker waves. Watch your children closely because we do have a number of drownings every year.

Nelson: When we go out and do inspections, we look at whether all the barriers around water bodies are in place because kids are curious and they get around a body of water and slip in. Folks who have an above-ground pool, control access to it. The process of drowning can be very, very quiet and unnoticeable. And if you’re out boating, it is the law that you have your flotation devices.

McNickle: In Grays Harbor, our water is cold because we have a lot of mountain runoff. It might be warm on top, but when you get down below, it’s cold. That can cause some muscle spasms.

Stoddard: Which can lead to panic and sudden flailing arms because people don’t know what they’re doing in the cold water.

Nelson: It’s worth mentioning to maintain awareness of wildfire smoke impacts and where you get information because of the potential for a heavy wildfire season. There are monitoring sensors in Grays Harbor County that the state maintains, and there are also smaller networked sensors called Purple Air. On the Washington Air Quality Map, you can the air quality index (https://airqualitymap.ecology.wa.gov/). And if you don’t have central air or otherwise have the capacity, in your home to filter particulates out, there is information to make your own HEPA air filter. (See https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/do-it-yourself-air-cleaners-making-cleaner-air-more-accessible )

Stoddard: If you’re going hiking or backpacking, make sure you let somebody know that you’re going. And carry a LifeStraw that allows you to filter the water; you don’t want to drink out of a stream if you don’t have to.

Bausher: Your risks really go up when you do things alone because you are by yourself in an accident or an event is not reported in a timely fashion.

Stoddard: All the fun things also have risks, and our emergency preparedness team has done a lot of work at different outreach events to educate the public about those sorts of things too, such as bicycle helmets – that’s a preventative safety measure.

Last thoughts

Bausher: Wash your hands, be careful. When in doubt, throw it out.

Nelson: I’m a big advocate for food thermometers, and they’re not that expensive. And I find it helpful to think of Grays Harbor County as a microcosm of Washington State, because we have the drier agricultural east county and the coastal part of the county. There can be drastic considerations between those two environments in terms of what the threats are. Such as, when we were doing mosquito surveillance, we would see more vector species in east county that could carry West Nile virus than we would in the west because those were mostly saltwater species; those are little interesting nuances.