Best views, weather, etc. How to test them 👓 SC, Ala. sites look back Betty Ford honored
NEWS
Public health and safety

Budget cuts hurt USA's ability to prepare for Ebola

Liz Szabo
USA TODAY
Registered nurse Keene Roadman, stands fully dressed in personal protective equipment during a training class at the Rush University Medical Center, Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014, in Chicago. With hospital workers increasingly in the spotlight of concern over the spread of the Ebola virus, the hospital held a training session for a team of medical professionals with expertise in intensive care and infection control.

While the USA has a new Ebola czar, years of budget cuts have left it with far fewer public health ground troops.

President Obama tapped veteran government insider Ron Klain Friday in response to withering criticism of the nation's response to Ebola.

But public health doctors and nurses say the USA's ability to prevent and treat Ebola infections has been hobbled by years of budget cuts.

The budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- which has been hammered this week by criticisms of its response to Ebola -- fell nearly $1 billion from 2012 to 2013, or about 10%.

State and local health departments have cut more than 50,000 staff positions -- about 20% of their workforce -- since 2008, according to the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Those cuts create "enormous potential for confusion, chaor and flawed decision-making" in a public health emergency, according to a report from the Institute of Medicine, which advises the government on health.

The cuts reflect both the pain of the recession, as well as the nation's waning interest in disaster preparedness, said Tener Goodwin Veenema, an associate professor and at Johns Hopkins University's School of Nursing and the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

"The responses are always top-down, but the real solution shoudl be bottom up," with more training and resources for local public health workers, Veenema said.

Although the nation went on high alert after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 -- and the anthrax attacks that followed -- the country has lost enthusiasm for preparing for mass disasters, Veenema said.

The attacks of 2001 showed that "our hospitals, our public health system constituted a very important part of homeland security," Veenema said. "It shone a light on the importance of public health."

Funding and training for mass casualty and bioterror drills has faded, however, she said. "We've absolutely paid the price," Veenema said.

The country's fumbling response to its first Ebola cases "should be a wake-up call," said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington.

"We have no uniform quality control," Gostin said. "We have hospitals that are the best of the best, but we also have a lot of mediocre" facilities.

The USA's commitment to public health tends to wax and wane with each crisis, Gostin said. "When we had anthrax, we ramped up for anthrax. When we had SARS, we ramped up for SARS. Then we forgot."

Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas staff line the drive that exits the emergency room as they wait for an ambulance carrying Nina Pham to depart, Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014, in Dallas, Texas. Pham, a nurse at the hospital was diagnosed with the Ebola virus after caring for Thomas Eric Duncan who died of the same virus. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez) ORG XMIT: TXTG111
Featured Weekly Ad