Free screenings offered at health & wellness fair
More than 400 community members attended the annual Sanford Vermillion Community Health & Wellness Fair Saturday at the Lee Andrew E. Lee Memorial Medicine and Science Building.
Sponsored by Sanford Vermillion, the event is free and held in partnership with USD’s Health Sciences Departments.
“We really couldn’t do this if it weren’t for all of the students who are helping us out throughout the health fair,” said Mary Merrigan, the director of public relations for Sanford Vermillion.
Merrigan said the fair, which is in its eighth year, first started as an idea from a health committee that was formed by the City of Vermillion.
“We wanted to do something that brought the community into a hospital area and offer some different things and it worked really well the first couple of years, but then honestly we wanted to see it grow,” she said. “We wanted to make it bigger and we knew that to do that we had to host it somewhere else in the community and we were going to need partners.”
Attendees of Saturday’s fair were able to take part in cooking classes, learn more about different health programs at USD and take advantage of 18 fee-reduced lab screenings. These screenings ranged from oral cancer testing to cholesterol testing.
Merrigan said it’s important that people learn about their own health and find out “what their numbers are.”
“All of those screenings — at a reduced rate — it’s just so much more economical if somebody wants to do a walk-in screening like this to find out what their cholesterol is or even their blood sugar,” she said.
One of the USD departments that was present at the fair was the Department of Dental Hygiene. Taylor Tatge, a senior dental hygiene student, said the department was offering oral cancer screenings to attendees.
“We’ll be doing an oral cancer screening for them like check their tongue, check their cheeks and everything,” she said. “We’ll then paint on fluoride if they like that. The fluoride just helps remineralize their teeth and helps the bacteria stay away.”
Tatge said having multiple students from various USD health departments at the fair allows them to compliment each other with the services they provide.
“The mouth is the opening to like everything in the body, and so having us here with everyone else here is like having a whole body — like a whole health and wellness fair day,” she said.
Beau Sullivan, a community member, said he came to the fair with his girlfriend and her grandmother after hearing about it from them.
“They always come to this every year and it sounded pretty cool, so I decided to walk through. I was kind of surprised at all the stuff they have here, the different screenings you can do and a lot of different sign ups for different screenings,” he said.
Because he was one just a few years ago, Sullivan said he knows college students can sometimes feel invincible, but added that health awareness is important.
“Things like this are kind of nice to kind of put things in perspective for you,” he said.
