The New York Times - May 17, 2009
David W. Chen

An infectious-disease specialist and a longtime advocate of using government to promote healthier behavior is expected to be named New York’s health commissioner by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Monday, according to people who have been briefed on the matter.

Dr. Thomas A. Farley of the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine will replace Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the high-profile and sometimes controversial commissioner who on Friday was named by President Obama as the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The speed with which a replacement was chosen underscores the importance of the post, as well as the urgency of the H1N1 flu outbreak that Dr. Farley must confront. Six schools in Queens and Brooklyn are closed this week because dozens of children have reported flulike symptoms. An inmate at Rikers Island was also hospitalized with H1N1, known as swine flu.

But the leadership transition could be seamless, given the connection between the departing and incoming commissioners.

Dr. Farley, 53, spent a year in 2007 and 2008 as a senior adviser to Dr. Frieden at the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The two were also co-authors of a paper, “Public Health in New York City, 2002-2007: Confronting Epidemics of the Modern Era,” that was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology last year.

In an interview this year in The New Wave, an online newsletter published by Tulane, Dr. Farley seemed to have relished his stint in New York.

“The New York City health department has long been an innovator and has been recognized as such across the nation,” he said. “The whole rest of the country looks to them for leadership. It was very exciting to be in a place where we felt like we were breaking new ground. My job was to be an all-purpose adviser. I was dealing with an incredibly broad range of issues.”

Dr. Farley did not return an e-mail message or a call placed to his home in New Orleans on Saturday. The mayor’s office and the city’s health department said only that a formal announcement would be made on Monday.

But three people briefed on the selection said Dr. Farley was a logical successor to Dr. Frieden, who led the crusade to ban smoking in restaurants and bars, campaigned to require many restaurants to eliminate trans fats and post calorie counts on menus and pushed to make H.I.V. testing a routine part of medical exams.

Dr. Farley, these people said, has a strong background in public health management and shares with Mr. Bloomberg an unbridled — and at times contentious — enthusiasm for using government to curb salt, high fat content and sugar in food, and to promote pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly endeavors.

“Tom Farley is a really top-notch epidemiologist and a really, really well-respected public health official,” said a former New York City health official who had been told about the selection, but spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to upstage the announcement. “He has a lot of interest in addressing the issues that are causing people to have poor health.”

Dr. Farley, a New Jersey native, has medical and public health degrees from Tulane, according to a Tulane faculty profile. His background is also uncannily similar to Dr. Frieden’s.

Both are infectious-disease specialists and have worked at the C.D.C. Both have worked overseas — Dr. Frieden in India, on tuberculosis control, and Dr. Farley in Haiti, on children’s health.

And Dr. Farley is no stranger to government, having worked at the Louisiana Office of Public Health on anti-obesity measures, and on efforts to prevent tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases and H.I.V. and AIDS.

“My work in prevention of S.T.D.’s/H.I.V. led me to think about the social forces underlying high-risk sexual behavior,” he wrote on his online faculty profile. “I then became interested in a wide range of health problems prevalent in the U.S. and the social and environmental factors underlying them.”

In 2005, Dr. Farley, who is chairman of Tulane’s community health sciences department, and Dr. Deborah A. Cohen, a senior natural scientist at the Rand Corporation, wrote “Prescription for a Healthy Nation,” a book that provoked the kind of polarizing reaction that Dr. Frieden and Mr. Bloomberg are accustomed to.

“Since it is, in Farley and Cohen’s view, our ‘physical and social environment’ that’s making us sick, we should make small changes in that environment to encourage health, such as lowering the price of healthy foods and enforcing such rules as a workplace ban on snack food in cubicles,” Publishers Weekly said in a review. “Unfortunately, throughout this litany of human foibles and social and governmental failures, there’s a pervasive tone of puritanical disapproval, and Americans are unlikely to pay attention to this pair of scolds.”