Karen Walega was the Marion-Rochester Health District director from 1989 until retiring from that position in 2020, and she has served as Rochester’s health director since then.
When she fully retires on June 23 at age 66, she’ll be able to boast successfully guiding Marion and Rochester through 35 years of developments in the public-health landscape, from strengthening health-related regulations and services across the region to winning the hard-fought war against the COVID-19 pandemic and other threatening viruses.
When the Acushnet native attended college at what was then Southeastern Massachusetts University in Dartmouth, she was interested in a career in environmental science, until a professor there encouraged her to pursue a public-health career. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Biology at SMU in 1981, then a Master’s Degree in Public Health from Boston University in 1988.
Her first public-health job while attending BU was as health inspector for the Town of Norwood from 1983 to 1986, then health inspector for the Town of Bourne from 1986 to 1989.
She was hired as regional sanitarian of what was then the Acushnet-Marion-Rochester Health District in December 1989. The district, she said, was the wisdom of Ted Pratt of Marion to find a way to get professional, dedicated public-health services help to the small towns.
Acushnet left the district in 1997, she said, because it was facing so much new development that it needed its own services, not shared regional services. But the momentum of the district as a whole, as her position of director and health inspector within it evolved, never slowed.
In 1995, Walega recalled, Marion became the first town in the area to pass tobacco-control regulations, banning tobacco-vending machines, tobacco sales to minors and smoking in public. In 1996, the district took more action on this effort with a state grant it won to start a Tobacco Control Collaborative, which allowed it to hire Judith Coykendall as its director. That district collaborative joined with the Barnstable County Tobacco Control Program to modify the district’s regulations in 2006.
“We had to stay a step ahead of the tobacco industry,” Walega recalled. The Marlboro Tobacco Company, she explained, sent to Route 6 a van to sell smoking paraphernalia to children and parents. “Judith (Coykendall) told them they had to leave,” Walega said. “We told them they couldn’t entice children that way. Our regulations evolved as the industry evolved.”
As an example, in 2019, Governor Baker declared vaping and e-cigarettes a danger to lung health; the district hosted programs and regulatory changes to meet these new challenges.
The challenge around 2003 was the Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE) virus, she said, when aerial spraying took place in the late summer, closing beaches and parks. When West Nile virus struck, she recalled, dead crows fell from the sky and animal control officers had to collect and send them to a Boston lab for testing.
The district organized a vaccine clinic for H1N1 (flu) in 2010.
“It was our first pandemic,” Walega said. “It taught us a lot for when the COVID pandemic came along.” The result: She and the district were more than ready to organize a successful drive-through clinic for that vaccine at the Rochester Department of Public Works barn.
In between these accomplishments came her biggest personal challenge. A pig farmer on Cushman Road in Rochester in 1990 was fertilizing his cornfields with fish remains called gurry that created a stench throughout the neighborhood. He would truck it to the site in the late evening or early morning and let it sit there over the weekend.
Walega called the police for him to stop this practice, but his stubbornness to comply led to Plymouth District Court and Superior Court proceedings that dragged on for years. He even stalked her, said Walega, leading her to file a restraining order against him.
But Walega is a soft-spoken woman by nature and seems to have taken this all in her stride. She said this story ended only when the man passed away.
Her own story as the region’s health director is ending now, she said, because post-COVID public-health regulations are requiring her to be recertified as a health inspector. “After 40 years of service in public health, I don’t want to go through the recertification process again,” she said.
Also, in 2020 Marion, too, wanted to separate from the health district, wishing to be more independent again. So she “retired” from the district position and worked solely in Rochester until reaching retirement age.
Another motivation for retiring now is that her mother, whom she had been caring for, passed away two months ago.
“Now it’s time to do things for me,” Walega said. “It’s time to enjoy my life. Golf. Pickleball. Travel. Do more in my garden. I loved my job. But it’s my turn to go. I was lucky to get this job. It’s bittersweet. I’ll be sad to leave. It’s been a wonderful career for me.”
By Michael J. DeCicco