February 21, 2008
Report Assesses Ability of State Health Departments to Respond to Emergencies
 
Whether states are making good use of some $5 billion in federal funding they’ve gotten since 2002 to improve their ability to respond to public health threats such as an influenza pandemic is assessed in a report released yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Overall, things have improved somewhat at the state level, the CDC said: for example, all state public health departments can now receive urgent reports about disease 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Also, the number of laboratories that can test and analyze samples has nearly doubled since 2001, and all state health departments now systematically train their workers in a wide range of emergency responses. But work remains to be done in some important public health areas, according to the report, including:

• Improving the ability to quickly dispense  medicines and vaccines in an affected community;
• Increasing the use of electronic health data for  preparedness and response by networking surveillance systems, and
• Increasing public health mutual aid agreements  to enable sharing of supplies, equipment, personnel, and information during  emergencies.