CDC Director: The US public health system still relies on last century technology and is not ready for the next pandemic. CDC Director | United States
On June 29th, according to the New York Post news website, Rochelle Valensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, stated in a commentary article in American media that the United States has been underinvesting in public health for decades and is not ready for the next global pandemic.
Valensky said that data shows that there is a shortage of 80000 public health workers across the United States to meet public health needs, and American laboratories lack both state-of-the-art equipment and skilled laboratory scientists to conduct research.
She also expressed regret that the US public health system still relies on outdated technologies from the 1980s. "Until today, some of our public health data systems still rely on old fax machines."
For example, in 2020, the public health department in Austin, Texas received over 1000 faxes every day and manually entered the epidemic data from the faxes into a database, according to Valensky. In Washington, D.C., 25 National Guard personnel were assigned the task of manually inputting epidemic data.
Valensky issued a warning to the US public health system as she was about to step down as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She had previously stated that she would resign at the end of June.
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