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No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.<\/p>\n
In the midst of a strange outbreak of\u00a0hantavirus on a cruise ship\u00a0that involves Americans and\u00a0is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government\u2019s top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been\u00a0missing in action, according to a number of experts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe seem to have things under very good control,\u201d President Donald Trump told reporters Friday evening.<\/p>\n
But experts say\u00a0the situation\u00a0has not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe CDC is not even a player,\u201d said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen that before.\u201d<\/p>\n
The CDC\u2019s diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.<\/p>\n
The hantavirus outbreak is \u201ca sentinel event\u201d that speaks to \u201chow well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I\u2019m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,\u201d said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.<\/p>\n
Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man\u2019s wife and a German woman, who both died.<\/p>\n
Hantavirus was\u00a0first identified\u00a0as a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.<\/p>\n
For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what they should know and how they should worry.<\/p>\n
Such actions were a large reason why the CDC developed a reputation as the world\u2019s premier public health agency.<\/p>\n
But this time, the WHO has been center stage. It made the risk assessment that has told people the outbreak is not a pandemic threat.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think this is a giant threat to the United States,\u201d said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University\u2019s Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out \u201cjust shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, has\u00a0restricted CDC scientists\u00a0from talking to international counterparts at times and embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through one-on-one agreements with individual countries.<\/p>\n
The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency\u2019s ship sanitation program.<\/p>\n
As this was playing out, Trump\u2019s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,\u00a0said he was working\u00a0to \u201crestore the CDC\u2019s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.\u201d<\/p>\n
The CDC has not been completely silent on hantavirus.<\/p>\n
The agency on Wednesday issued a short statement that said the risk to the American public is \u201cextremely low,\u201d and described the U.S. government as \u201cthe world\u2019s leader in global health security.\u201d<\/p>\n
Said Nuzzo: \u201cNot only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility.\u201d<\/p>\n
The CDC\u2019s acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya,\u00a0posted a message\u00a0on social media that the agency was lending its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials this week said they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who left the ship \u2014 a person with no symptoms and not considered contagious \u2014 had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC has been sharing technical information.<\/p>\n
The CDC also is \u201cmonitoring the health status and preparing medical support for all of the American passengers on the cruise,\u201d Bhattacharya wrote.<\/p>\n
But federal health officials have mostly been tight-lipped, declining interview requests. Some details emerged not through public statements but through disclosures from anonymous sources, including news Friday that the CDC was sending a team to Spain\u2019s Canary Islands to meet the Americans onboard.<\/p>\n
On Friday evening, health officials issued an updated statement, confirming the deployment of a team to the Canary Islands. They also said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to a quarantine center.<\/p>\n
In interviews this week, some experts made a comparison with a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the setting of one of the first large COVID-19 outbreaks outside of China.<\/p>\n
The CDC sent personnel to the port, helped evacuate American passengers,\u00a0ran quarantines, shared genetic data on the virus, coordinated with the WHO and Japan, held public briefings and rapidly published reports \u201cthat became the world\u2019s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission,\u201d said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director.<\/p>\n
Some aspects of the international response to the Diamond Princess\u00a0were criticized,\u00a0and it did not halt the outbreak or stop COVID-19\u2019s spread across the world. But some experts say it was not for the CDC\u2019s lack of trying.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe CDC was right on top of it, very visible, very active in trying to manage and contain it,\u201d Gostin said, while the agency\u2019s work now is delayed and subdued.<\/p>\n
Instead of working with nearly all of the world\u2019s nations through the WHO, the Trump administration has pursued bilateral health agreements with individual nations for information sharing, public health support, and what it describes as \u201cthe introduction of innovative American technologies.\u201d Roughly 30 agreements are currently in place.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not sufficient, Gostin said. \u201cYou can\u2019t possibly cover a global health crisis by doing one-on-one deals with countries here and there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
#hantavirus #outbreak #unfolds #CDC #missing #action #experts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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