The Advocate: Dr. Erin Kobetz

The address may have been unfamiliar, but the statistics were enough to get her moving. Dr. Erin Kobetz was in her office at the University of Miami medical school, pouring over Florida medical data, when statistics from a certain neighborhood jumped out at her—the area, she noticed, had four times the state average of cervical cancer. When she looked more closely at the numbers, she realized she didn’t recognize the cross streets, not entirely surprising since she’d just recently returned after being away for 15 years, studying public health in Georgia and North Carolina. So “I got in my car and drove. And very quickly I realized I was in Little Haiti because of the number of signs written in Creole,” the 38-year-old Kobetz recalled. As someone who’d spent years devoted to making communities healthier, it came as a shock. “But I decided,” she said, “to use it as an opportunity to take action.”

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