Presidential hopefuls have said little about global health, but preparing for pandemics should be high on the public agenda, says Gavin Yamey.
Yamey is a professor of the practice of global health at the Duke Global Health Institute and at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy.
Transcript:
From Duke University, this is Glad You Asked, where we consider the question, “What should we be talking about this election season?”
“My name is Gavin Yamey. I’m a new professor in the practice of Global Health in the Duke Global Health Institute. Global health is getting practically zero attention right now in the U.S. presidential debate. But what Ebola exposed is that there aren’t really, in global health, any shortcuts.
"When Ebola happened, there wasn’t a great public health system in place. We had no medicine, no vaccine, and no rapid diagnostic test for this disease. I think that for the global health community, this was something that exposed really major weaknesses in the international health response.
"There are going to be outbreaks in the future. The question is, do we have a system in place that can respond in a timely, effective way?
“So for example, if there is a serious flu pandemic, we want to have the technological capabilities to be able to produce the medicine and to vaccinate large numbers of people very quickly.
"Ebola showed us that we do not have that system in place. And we are not investing in the kind of pandemic preparedness system that we should be.
"We stand at a very remarkable time right now for global health, an unprecedented time. If we, as an international community, take the right steps in the next few years, we could see levels of infectious, maternal, and child deaths all around the world fall to universally low levels.
"Today, we have the financial and the ever-improving scientific capabilities to make that happen -- if the international community comes together to seize those opportunities.”
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