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White House Expert: Global Health is National Security Issue

Elizabeth Cameron, director for countering biological threats with the national security council, talks about how we face global challenges to fund the needed leverage of recourses to help better detect and respond to disease threats. The challenge is finding the funds to help this research and detection is at its highest and most effective potential as possible. Over the past decade, public health threats such as severe acute respiratory syndrome, and certain flu strains, including H5N1 and H1N1, have set local, regional and national governments in a hurry to coordinate a response. This article talked about the need to get past more than just Emergency preparedness. We have to get beyond asking how quickly cases were detected or how many vaccines were delivered and must get to a deeper understanding of the root causes, how and why this public health emergency occurred and why the system preformed as it did.

                  Understanding why and how a certain disease arose is important to making sure a global health crisis doesn’t occur, however it is also important come up with ways to solve future problems that haven’t occurred. Preparedness is crucial when it comes to preventing disease on a global level. Infections life threatening and contagious disease spread is so easily spread if we do not find ways to prevent the problem before it becomes a problem. For example, when we figured out that simply washing our hands after using the bathroom or before eating, we created a way to help minimize the chance of disease spread. Things as simple as this can help us prevent outbreaks that could become a global health problem. As technology advances we should make sure that we not only advance with that technology but we educate others that are less privileged and don’t have the recourses to become aware of this knowledge, become aware.

http://www.georgetown.edu/news/avian-flu-symposium-2014.html