Recession Leave Health Agencies Weakened in Swine Flu Defense
By KEVIN SACK, The New York Times
Health officials in affected states said they had thus far been able to manage the testing and treatment of infected residents and mount vigorous public education campaigns. But many said they had been able to do so only by shifting workers from other public health priorities, and some questioned how their depleted departments might handle a full-fledged pandemic.
“I’m very concerned,” said Robert M. Pestronk, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “Local health departments are barely staffed to do the work they do on a day-to-day basis. A large increase in workload will mean that much of the other work that is being done now won’t be done. And depending on the scale of an epidemic, capacity may be exceeded.”
At a news conference on Monday, Dr. Richard E. Besser, the acting director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the public health system was in “a tough situation.”
“We hear about tens of thousands of state public health workers who are going to be losing their jobs because of state budgets,” he said. “It is very important that we look at that resource because this outbreak was identified because of a lot of work going on around preparedness.”
Continue reading at The New York Times
Photo: Tambako the Jaguar/Flickr
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