Work Programme 2021 of the EU Initiative on Health Security News story On 27 March 2020, the European Commission Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations (DG NEAR) and ECDC signed an agreement for the implementation of the EU Initiative on Health Security.
This will enable tailor-made support to strengthen public health systems’ preparedness and response capacities of the European Union candidate and potential candidate and the European Neighbourhood Policy partner countries, and improve health security in the European neighbourhood. ECDC has developed a comprehensive programme for 2021 to enhance regional cooperation in the fields of epidemic intelligence, rapid risk assessment, preparedness and response. The goal is to empower partner countries’ professionals to better face the threats public health systems have to fight against. Several thematic events based on specific interests will be organised.
In early December 2019, I sat in a conference room at the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, listening to its director, Dr. Robert Redfield, answer a question: Is America ready for another major infectious disease like Ebola or the Zika virus?
Redfield s response reiterated what most public health experts knew, but coming from him, it was jarring. It’s not a secret,” he said. “Our nation is not prepared for a flu pandemic.”
He was certain such a pandemic would one day arrive, and although he couldn t foresee when, he knew it would be bad: “It’s going to be a huge loss of life.”
Biden picks 3 coordinators for Covid-19 response
The officials are set to play a major role in the president-elect s response to the worsening pandemic.
From left, Bechara Choucair, senior vice president and chief health officer for Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Hospitals; Carole Johnson, commissioner for New Jersey Department of Human Services; and Tim Manning, director of Washington operations and senior adviser at Pacific Disaster Center. | Kaiser Permanente/New Jersey Department of Human Services/Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies
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President-elect Joe Biden is expanding his White House Covid-19 Response team, tapping three senior officials to coordinate vaccine, testing and supply chain strategy in an announcement first shared with POLITICO.
Our Polluted Planet
Environmental contamination claims 9 million lives a year, and it’s going to get much worse. So BC has hired the acclaimed epidemiologist and public health champion Philip Landrigan ’63 to launch a new program and take on this global killer.
By Shannon Fischer
In 1948, 20 people in Donora, Pennsylvania, died from a toxic smog that enveloped the mill town for five long days. Twenty-one years later, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, glutted with factory waste, burst into flame and not for the first time, either. That was how it used to be in the United States: the city air was thick and acrid, asbestos lined our buildings, Lake Erie was a “cesspool,” according to