Are We Prepared for Emerging Infectious Diseases?

By Drs. David Niesel and Norbert Herzog, Medical Discovery News In the past several years, we have heard a lot about infectious microbes threatening the public health of all Americans. Some of the names of these agents seemed foreign at first but are familiar now - Ebola, MERS and Zika. But are these really new viruses causing disease? No, we have known about these microbes as disease threats in Africa, the Middle East and Central and South America for some time; we have known about Zika since the 1940s. A better way to describe these viruses is as emerging infectious diseases, viruses that used to be limited to small geographic foreign areas that now threaten to spread across the globe. And let's not forget the microbes that have plagued us for years like the flu. We are being assaulted from all directions. Standing between us and infectious microbes is our public health infrastructure that protects all Americans from infectious disease threats. A recent report by the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation raises concerns for our ability to prevent, detect, diagnose, respond and prevent infectious diseases outbreaks. They report, more than half of US states scored 5 or lower (out of 10) on key indicators related to managing infectious diseases. Some of these key indicators are public health funding, flu vaccination rates, HIV surveillance, childhood immunization rates, food safety, central line associated bloodstream hospital-acquired i...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news