Emails Reveal How Health Departments Struggle To Track Human Cases of Bird Flu.
Emails Reveal How Health Departments Struggle To Track Human Cases of Bird Flu.
Emails show how health officials struggle to track the bird flu, partly in deference to the agricultural industry. As a result, researchers don’t know how often farmworkers are being infected — and could miss alarming signals.
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Local health departments are chronically understaffed. For every 6,000 people in rural areas, there’s one public health nurse — who often works part-time, one analysis found.
“State and local public health departments are decimated resource-wise,” said Lurie, who is now an executive director at an international organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. “You can’t expect them to do the job if you only resource them once there’s a crisis.”
Another explanation is a lack of urgency because the virus hasn’t severely harmed anyone in the country this year. “If hundreds of workers had died, we’d be more forceful about monitoring workers,” Chessher said. “But a handful of mild symptoms don’t warrant a heavy-handed response.”
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