WITH the increasing number of viral disease outbreaks, including Ebola and SARS, public health officials are already girding for the next health disaster.
“It’s really urgent that we address the weak links and blind spots around the world,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Ebola is a powerful reminder than a health threat anywhere can affect us.”
The CDC and doctors around the world believe that Ebola—a rare and deadly viral infection that is the largest epidemic in history, affecting hundreds of thousands in West Africa and killing two in the US—sprang from a “blind spot” area that lacks the health systems needed to detect an outbreak before it becomes a crisis.
Now, the Obama administration has requested $600 million for the CDC to implement what it calls the Global Health Security Agenda, working with an international coalition to improve disease detection in high-risk countries, and protect against the next likely contagion.
The world has already seen bird flu disease affect millions in Southeast Asia, a respiratory killer SARS spread from China, the H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic in 2009, and a Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, the cousin of SARS, known as MERS.
Countries have taken vast measures shielding its borders from these and other deadly illnesses.
“If bird flu ever mutates to spread between people, we better look out. It will make Ebola look like a picnic,” said Senator Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, at a recent Senate Appropriations Committee as he questioned whether $600 million was enough to do the whole job.
Less than 20 percent of countries have reported meeting World Health Organization requirements of showing they are adequately prepared in case of an infectious threat.
The Obama administration kicked off the new global health security project back in February, unaware that Ebola was already quietly brewing in Guinea. Other countries like Finland and Indonesia joined the international movement in later meetings. In September, President Obama declared the world must “make sure we’re not caught flat-footed” in future disease outbreaks.
As part of its worldwide collaboration, the US plans to assist at least 30 countries over the next five years to bolster local disease prevention and monitoring, improve laboratory diagnosis of pathogens, and strengthen the overall emergency response to outbreaks.
“Consider Uganda, where in 2010 a lack of a good laboratory system was one reason it took a shockingly long 40 days to determine a mysterious outbreak was yellow fever,” said CDC scientist Jeff Borchert.
In 2013, the CDC began a pilot project to improve Uganda’s disease detection by piggybacking on a smaller program that tested babies born to mothers with HIV. Now, the country frequently tests samples from sick patients at a central lab to test for multiple diseases. An emergency operations center was also set up to oversee potential outbreaks.
Uganda’s new system proved itself, Borchert said. With a network of better testing and improved overall preparedness, Ugandans have been able to track down signs of deadly diseases and keep up with exposed contacts in the region. The CDC has also started similar small projects in countries like India, Thailand, and Vietnam to expand its outbreak-fighting capabilities.
The CDC has long trained public health workers all over the world to be disease detectives, but the newly funded international collaboration will supposedly be more comprehensive.
With the Ebola outbreak of this year, nations and leaders became more aware of the “ripple effect” that one unprepared country can have on the rest of the world.
Lawmakers want to know if the US will leave the Ebola-ravaged region in West Africa— high-risk countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea—with health systems more capable of responding to future outbreaks.
The CDC will expand its Ebola-specific work, such as training rapid response teams to investigate new cases, “so they’re better able to detect and respond to not only Ebola but other pathogens,” said Dr. Jordan Tappero, CDC’s director of global health protection. “It’s our intention to be there for the long-term to really build that public health capacity.”
Officials look to past cases as guides. Learning to tackle one disease, they’ve learned, can also pay off against another. For instance, Nigeria beat back Ebola threats thanks in part to its polio-fighting program that included labs and CDC-trained disease detectives who quickly switched gears to the new threat.
Disease outbreaks often spark calls for better global preparedness that could fade as the disease does.
“We should avoid a cycle in which we let our guard down once the immediate public health crisis passes,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.
Continued Frieden, “The world would be a very different place today if Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone had had those systems in place a year ago. They could have contained this outbreak.”
(With reports from The Associated Press)
(www.asianjournal.com)
(LA Midweek November 26-28, 2014 Sec. A pg.7)
