DURHAM, N.C. (WBTV) -When Sally Herndon was growing up in Charlotte in the 1960s, smoking advertisements were commonplace.

When she graduated from the School of Public Health in 1980, you could still smoke inside the buildings.

Few people were sounding the alarm. But Herndon was watching as her mother, a lifelong smoker, found herself coughing more and more. Sara Herndon had always warned her children never to take up smoking; Sally Herndon and her sisters had listened.

But now, just as Herndon was embarking on a career in public health, her mother was close to losing her personal battle with the addiction that would become Herndon’s life’s mission.

“She developed what’s called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is a slow suffocation,” Herndon said. “It’s a horrible way to go.”

Herndon gave up her first post-graduate public health job in Maine to come back to North Carolina to care for Sara Herndon. Her mother passed away at 74 years old.

Herndon’s younger sister Celeste had, like her siblings, never smoked. But in 2010, just as Herndon was completing one of her greatest career accomplishments in helping pass North Carolina legislation banning smoking in bars and restaurants, Celeste also died from issues stemming from secondhand smoke.

“It still hurts,” Herndon reflected softly. “She’s in my dreams all the time.”

Her family is the driving force behind a decades-long public health career in North Carolina marked by national accomplishments and culminating as the head of the Tobacco Prevention and Control branch within the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.

As an author on nationally-recognized research and the chair of the Tobacco Control Network, Herndon’s career has helped change how tobacco prevention is tackled both in North Carolina and across the country.

This year, that ended.

On April 1, federal staffers in tobacco prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed up to work and couldn’t get inside; their badges had been deactivated.

“I was coming back from a family reunion and heard that news and just started to cry,” Herndon said.

In May, the official letter came: the N.C. DHHS’s federal funds designated for tobacco prevention had been terminated. That amounted to $2.3 million annually, funding much of the DHHS’s tobacco prevention branch: Herndon and eight of her staffers were furloughed, leaving just three early-career professionals with jobs.

It’s a financial decision Herndon is still struggling to understand.

“Compare [the $2.3 million] to the cost of smoking in North Carolina. It cost the state of North Carolina $4.42 billion in excess healthcare costs alone,” she reflected. “I’m really sad and angry and worried that some of this will get rolled back.”

At a statewide level, many of the department’s tobacco prevention efforts have ended or been severely cut back – best practices developed out of decades of research for stopping youth from taking up smoking, protecting nonsmokers from smoking environments, and helping smokers get assistance to quit.

That includes efforts to curb youth vaping.

“It’s more than financial, it really is,” said acting public health director Dr. Kelly Kimple. “It directly affects the lives and health of the people that we serve.”

In Mecklenburg County, health director Dr. Raynard Washington said they ended tobacco awareness campaigns, stopped participation in the Youth Tobacco Survey, and lost data that helps the department identify emerging issues and target interventions.

They also lost state and federal support from people like the CDC staffers and Herndon’s own staff who lost their jobs as part of those cuts.

Mecklenburg County’s health director also fears new, untested tobacco products as a result.

“The recent cuts to federal and state tobacco prevention and control funding will have implications for our local community’s health and may result in more tobacco products coming into our neighborhoods without adequate regulatory efforts to reduce tobacco-related death and disease,” Dr. Washington wrote in a statement.

When asked about the cuts, a spokesperson for the federal Health and Human Services Department said that HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy was committed to investigating any “potential roof [sic] causes of the chronic disease epidemic.”

“Critical programs within the CDC will continue as part of Secretary Kennedy’s vision to streamline operations and create a more efficient HHS,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson also pointed to an ongoing national ad campaign highlighting tips from former smokers, running through September 2025.

For Herndon, all this feels like closure.

She’s chosen to turn her furlough into her retirement, hoping her legacy – and the mission of public health – remains intact.

“I really hope none of it gets rolled back,” she reflected.

“But I’m worried.”

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