Saturday, May 06, 2006
Playing with public health
It's one thing to say the burden will fall on local communities, yet another for the Bush administration and the Republican congress to have done so little to help them. But in addition the states have done little to help themselves. Along with cutting taxes and starving public services at the national level has come a feeding frenzy of the same at the state level, resulting in an enfeebled and anemic local public health infrastructure.
Democrats have gone along with this Republican initiative out of weakness or cowardice or stupidity or lack of principle. Take your pick. I simply won't give them a free pass on this. I hope now some true Opposition Party backbone is developing and that's to the good.
But there's also been too little leadership and push back from the medical and public health communities. The public health leaders within WHO have been saying it all along, and they've been right: Public health politicos stupidly embraced the promise of bioterrorism money as a way to beef up public health infrastructure, but -- not only didn't that happen -- the bioterrorism follies hollowed out public health like a cancer, diverting personnel, energies and commitments. So now a real public health threat comes along and suddenly we discover we aren't prepared. Surprise.
The root of the problem is an historic lack of funding for public health in the U.S. according to Dr. Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health: "We’re about to face the consequences of a health-care system that’s in essence been neglected and allowed to degrade over time. Now it’s too fragile to handle what could be an overwhelming emergency. The prospect of a pandemic should be putting us into high gear in terms of trying to fix the health-care system even before we get a pandemic."
In addition, Redlener says, we must face the question of who is going to pay for private-sector preparedness: "This is a public-health issue. Will the public get caught in middle between the private sector and the government in terms of fulfilling the pandemic flu agenda? We don’t want this to be a ping-pong match on who pays for it."
Democrats have gone along with this Republican initiative out of weakness or cowardice or stupidity or lack of principle. Take your pick. I simply won't give them a free pass on this. I hope now some true Opposition Party backbone is developing and that's to the good.
But there's also been too little leadership and push back from the medical and public health communities. The public health leaders within WHO have been saying it all along, and they've been right: Public health politicos stupidly embraced the promise of bioterrorism money as a way to beef up public health infrastructure, but -- not only didn't that happen -- the bioterrorism follies hollowed out public health like a cancer, diverting personnel, energies and commitments. So now a real public health threat comes along and suddenly we discover we aren't prepared. Surprise.
The root of the problem is an historic lack of funding for public health in the U.S. according to Dr. Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health: "We’re about to face the consequences of a health-care system that’s in essence been neglected and allowed to degrade over time. Now it’s too fragile to handle what could be an overwhelming emergency. The prospect of a pandemic should be putting us into high gear in terms of trying to fix the health-care system even before we get a pandemic."
In addition, Redlener says, we must face the question of who is going to pay for private-sector preparedness: "This is a public-health issue. Will the public get caught in middle between the private sector and the government in terms of fulfilling the pandemic flu agenda? We don’t want this to be a ping-pong match on who pays for it."
