Public Health: Disease, Epidemic & Pandemic Threat (merged thread)

[Uboat509]

Actually you are slicing health care and early warning prematurely early. Also, the targeted population during the anthrax event (not threat as people actually got sick) was not the general population. A pandemic is the "population" as with SARS or Bird Flu. Further the CDC has expressed they do not have nor can they respond to a general outbreak. They are an identification and warning agency. More akin to military intelligence operations than operational armor battalions.

That is by design. CDC was always intended to be a coordinating agency as well as performing some research functions. A true epidemic is going to be beyond the capabilities of any one government agency anyway. CDC will coordinate the response of the elements already on the ground to respond to the threat as well as providing information and (I believe) advisers to the local responding elements. CDC does that pretty well as far as I know. The real inherent weakness in the system is just like in MI, the sensors. For the system to work, the sensor (doctor, nurse, health care professional etc.) has to a) recognize that there is something that needs to be reported and b) actually report it. Easier said than done. The only way to get around that would be to place someone in each hospital, clinic etc. to report to the CDC. That's not an especially practical solution. Again, more government bureaucracy is not the answer.

The wariness you express is the result of the political process. The military has universal healthcare (if you can call tri-care healthcare). The problem is that priorities are askew in considering the specific issues.

Nah, TRI-CARE isn't really any better or worse than an average HMO and in fact Tri-West is a subsidiary of Blue Cross/Blue Shield (a fact they don't seem to advertise ).

Don't get me wrong or attribute political ideology that would be incorrect or misplaced. I can see an issue, identify the problems, recognize the severity of the threat along with the likeliness of an actual event. Without devolving into political speak. I am not an expert at pandemic, but I have read many journal articles, been to many conferences, and listened to people who are experts. This is an issue that simply isn't discussed because of the political baggage of the Clinton presidency.

Yet it is incredibly important.

It is also an issue of all the times that wolf has been cried over the years. In the eighties, AIDs was going to kill us all, then it was Ebola, then Mad Cow disease, then SARs and most recently (my personal favorite) H5N1 bird flu. All of these were going to kill us all and none really lived up to the hype. I am a medic. I know that there is some nasty stuff out there waiting for the chance to give us a nasty death (other than tofu, I mean, which is a work of pure culinary Evil) but the hysteria around the "epidemics" that I mentioned mixed with all the other stuff than is going to kill us (plastics, cholesterol, well bad cholesterol or not enough good cholesterol or too many triglycerides, or eggs, no wait a minutes eggs are good for you, no wait they're bad again, no they're good, no bad and so on) have led to a significant amount of apathy on the part of John Q. Public and if John doesn't really care about it then the politicians aren't going to pretend to care either.

SFC W

[AdamG]

London (AFP) - Fears that the west African Ebola outbreak could spread to other continents grew with European and Asian countries on alert and a leading medical charity warning the epidemic was out of control.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said the crisis gripping Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone would only get worse and warned there was no overarching strategy to handle the world's worst outbreak of the disease.

US Christian charity Samaritan's Purse was temporarily withdrawing its non-essential staff from Liberia, it said, citing regional "instability and ongoing security issues".

Hong Kong announced quarantine measures for suspected cases, although one woman arriving from Africa with possible symptoms tested negative, while the EU said it was ready to deal with the threat.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has held talks with global health officials on potential measures to halt the spread of the disease.

http://news.yahoo.com/uk-holds-emerg...084704564.html