Infectious Disease

Stan, Clarence, Barry, and the Health Chatter team chat with Dr. Mike Osterholm about infectious diseases.

Dr. Osterholm - a Regents Professor, McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in Public Health, and the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota - has an extensive and distinguished career in infectious disease. Dr. Osterholm has also held numerous positions throughout state and local governments serving as the Science Envoy for Health Security on behalf of the U.S. Department of State, Special Advisor to the then Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, and various roles at the Minnesota Department of Health. In addition to the countless published articles, Dr. Osterholm is the author of Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs.

Listen along as Dr. Osterholm and the Health Chatter team chat about the effects of infectious disease and the importance of being prepared. As we learned with COVID, it is not a matter of if, but rather a matter of when.

Join the conversation at healthchatterpodcast.com

Brought to you in support of Hue-MAN, who is Creating Healthy Communities through Innovative Partnerships.

More about their work can be found at http://huemanpartnership.org/

Research

• A little history (Mayo Clinic)
• 1796 Smallpox
• 1885 Rabies
• 1914 whooping cough
• 1945 influenza
• 1955 polio
• 1963-1967 Measles, mumps and rubella
• 1952-2016 zika virus
• 2002-2021 MERS and SARS
• 2020 COVID-19
• We don’t hear a lot of these infectious diseases anymore due to vaccines; The creation of more closely connected communities gave infectious diseases the chance to grow into epidemics. Diseases like influenza, smallpox, leprosy, malaria, and tuberculosis were among those that have thrived since this shift.  
• The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is often described as an ‘unprecedented’ event, as the outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) took many by surprise. However, from a scientific and historical standpoint, the novel coronavirus pandemic was entirely predictable. (Cite)
• What we're dealing with presently (CDC)
• CDC lists current outbreaks on their website
• Salmonella in various meats, veggies in the US
• Ebola, COVID and MPox 
• International Health Travel Notices
• Measles, Dengue, oropouche fever, 
• What we should be on the lookout for going forward
• Antimicrobial resistance… scientists want faster vaccine response but will infectious diseases 
• Disease X… Its purpose is to encourage proactive thinking about pathogens that could cause a pandemic. It represents a way to push people's thinking forward so that they're not wedded to lists of prior pandemic pathogens, like influenza.
• Proper funding at the Federal and State levels
• Federal Funding 
• National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Food and Drug Administration
• Health Resources and Services Administration
• U.S. Agency for International Development
• National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center
• Funding issues 
• As the United States emerges from the pandemic, this time the nation must use lessons learned to build a world-class, standing-ready public health infrastructure and workforce with adequate and sustained funding, lest any U.S. resident ever again experience a year like the past one. TFAH 
• While it is too soon to calculate with precision, it is likely that the United States might have averted spending much of the trillions of dollars that the COVID-19 pandemic cost if it had invested just a few billion dollars more in public health spending earlier.
• Communication issues
• When the Next Disease Strikes: How To Communicate (and How Not To) 
• Who do we trust?  
• Survey reveals low trust in US public health agency information amid pandemic 
• "Our findings suggest the need to support a robust federal, state, and local public health communications infrastructure; ensure agencies' authority to make science-based recommendations; and develop strategies for engaging different segments of the public,"

• How to get the public to understand and be more proactive now that we have faced a pandemic?