The U.S. has recently had outbreaks of a number of infectious diseases, such as measles, mpox and HIV. These outbreaks have exposed critical gaps that exist in public health systems, according to Doctor Monica Gandhi, a medicine professor at UCSF (University of California, San Francisco).
She explains that these outbreaks have highlighted the various vulnerabilities that exist in an environment that is already plagued by worsening staff shortages and funding shortfalls.
She points out that vaccine coverage is dropping rapidly, especially over recent years. Such a trend is creating room for vaccine-preventable infectious diseases like measles to re-emerge and affect a lot more people. The current policies of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, such as scaling down vaccine mandates, are likely to worsen the situation. This is bound to place additional strain on public health systems around the country that already face numerous challenges.
Gandhi also flags the declining coordination between healthcare institutions responsible for public health. For example, the U.S. recently withdrew from the World Health Organization. This is likely to hamper how effectively the country can collaborate with other countries in case a major infectious disease outbreak occurs, such as the ongoing Ebola outbreak that has been flagged as an outbreak of international concern.
In the U.S., Gandhi says her work reveals that in communities where people face housing instability, such as the homeless or low-income earners that keep moving from one location to another in search for work, infectious diseases like hepatitis B and C have a higher incidence because such people lack access to ongoing preventive care and treatment.
Staff shortages are another critical gap making it harder for current and future infectious disease outbreaks to be effectively managed. Existing staff are overloaded and many of them lack the experience of quickly recognizing and containing communicable diseases since many of those diseases had been almost eliminated by decades of vigilance and vaccination.
In such a case, an infected person may expose lots of other people to the disease and by the time the infection is flagged, it is hard to trace and quarantine the contacts of that individual. In a medical facility setting, the risks are graver because germs can remain in the air long after the infected person has left the location.
Doctor Gandhi also decries the limited diagnostic capacity available to quickly detect infectious diseases. Most infections require samples to be taken to centralized labs, and many resource-constrained public health systems don’t have these facilities.
Several companies like Co-Diagnostics Inc. (NASDAQ: CODX) are striving to develop diagnostic tools that can be used at point-of-care facilities and even at home. As these tools become widely available, detecting and implementing appropriate interventions against infectious diseases could become possible despite the other challenges that exist in public health systems.
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