Word: cdc
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...meantime there was no reason to fear the sick. Thompson and Ridge, national doctors without a medical degree between them, have been no match for that kind of performance. Even Satcher has not achieved the same iconic status. During the anthrax attacks, says Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, chief of the CDC, "we found ourselves deploying more and more people just to work on communication issues...
That work is important for more than p.r. reasons. When an unfamiliar disease hits, even doctors may not know what the signs of the illness are and what to do when patients turn up in their waiting rooms. If HHS, the CDC and other government agencies are jostling one another on the podium, the message is often mixed. And when you toss in the local police and the FBI--as was the case with anthrax--that mixed message turns to gibberish. During the hantavirus outbreak of 1993, the government handled the problem well, with Dr. C.J. Peters, then chief...
...rooms often perform this function in an ad hoc way; the emergence of West Nile virus in New York City was first detected by a hospital physician who was suspicious of two cases of encephalitis among her patients and prodded the city health department to launch an investigation. The CDC relies on a national network of sentinel doctors to do this kind of monitoring during flu season and uses a similar system of local labs and DNA fingerprinting to track food-borne illnesses. Cities and states have physician-alert programs that do the same...
...million from its share of the national tobacco settlement to establish five new health departments that cover 19 of the state's 93 counties. Texas is relying on revenue from the state's telecommunications fund to wire itself for the Health Alert Network. Georgia, which had been given CDC grants to fight such problems as West Nile virus and emerging infections, decided that the best way to do that was to hire a new team of epidemiologists to keep an eye out for all these ills. Such self-sufficiency at the state level will not only make grass-roots disease...
...demanding prescriptions "just in case," and pharmacies, particularly in New York, Washington and Florida, couldn't keep up. Other antibiotics, including doxycycline and that old standby penicillin, are just as effective against the particular strain that was showing up in tainted letters, and a few weeks later, when the cdc recommended that doctors switch to those, Cipro's days in the spotlight were over...