Disease authority pushes for preparedness

Mankind is smart but can’t harness nature, which periodically proves its dominance with surprise natural disasters and devastating disease rampages that twist, turn and torture humans to unimaginable degrees.

Few, if any, people in the world know more details about nature’s secret weapons – AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, hemorrhagic fevers, for example – than Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Laurie Garrett. Garrett has traveled the globe and interviewed infectious disease experts and victims worldwide to understand the magnitude of the threat facing the human race.

On Tuesday at 7 p.m., Garrett will share her disease knowledge with the public in North Idaho College’s Schuler Auditorium. Her hour-long presentation is free. The Panhandle Health District and Kootenai Medical Center invited Garrett as part of a new focus on preparing communities to prevent or mitigate potential disasters.

“This is a time of public health preparedness. We need one antenna up for bioterrorism and one up for potential pandemic influenza,” said Randi Lustig, the health district’s program manager for epidemiology services. “Laurie Garrett could help increase awareness and suspicion and not just sound like an alarmist.”

A preparedness grant from U.S. Health and Human Services paid for the visit from Garrett, whose grasp on the rise and routines of killer diseases around the world is in demand nationwide. Her message, though, is one of priorities during a period when the United States can’t see beyond the threat of terrorism.

“Right now we need to take a deep breath, rethink how much we’ve scared ourselves to death, go through a list of priorities and see if it makes sense,” Garrett said Thursday by phone. “We need to be prepared for anthrax and have hospital drills for terrorism. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing we’re ready for whatever nature throws our way.

“We still have a long way to go.”

That message is exactly what Lustig wants health providers in North Idaho to hear. The health district depends on health workers in the field to report observations of anything that might indicate disease. Lustig is certain that many health workers assume the single case they see in their offices doesn’t signify a trend or epidemic, so they don’t report their suspicions. But health care providers who don’t share their observations place the community at risk, Lustig said.

“Public health is a place that collects pieces and tries to put them together in a picture. But we can’t do it without the pieces,” she said. “Laurie Garrett can help providers understand they are our eyes.”

The focus on terrorism has shifted U.S. dollars from public health programs that protect drinking water and enforce health standards in restaurants to bioterrorism preparedness, Garrett said.

“We’re well over $3 billion in spending for bioterrorism since 9/11, and the White House is actually proposing to cut the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) budget by 12 percent,” she said.

It’s just such thinking that led to the distribution last week of the deadly 1957 flu virus to 18 countries, she said. The 1957 flu virus killed close to 4 million people. It ran its course and hasn’t been included in a flu vaccine since 1968. Anyone born after 1968 has no immunity to the 1957 strain.

For 37 years, the CDC hasn’t increased the safety level for the 1957 flu virus, even though millions of people have no immunity to the killer strain. The lab that released the virus last week as part of routine testing noted its lower level 2 safety designation. Cutting the CDC’s budget won’t solve such oversights or lead to a safer country, Garrett said.

“How could they not classify it as pathogen level 3?” she said. “Many countries think we’re nuts. Here in the U.S., we’re fixated on terrorists. It’s irrational.”

“The U.S. budgets $400 million” to respond to international disease, she said. “We spend more than that in a week in New York City.”