August 19, 2022 – How infectious disease is handled in the United States is different than it is in the United Kingdom. With this fact in mind, did the United States learn from the COVID-19 pandemic and is the US prepared for new diseases to arrive compared to how the UK handled it? What about a new disease on US shores, like monkeypox? Is the US ready? According to an infectious disease expert, Ambassador Deborah Birx, MD, a world-renowned medical expert and leader, sat down with Infection Control Today® (ICT®), and said that the US has the tools, but we are not prepared.
Birx discusses what she sees as the mistakes the United States made with the beginning of monkeypox. Other topics covered in the interview her upcoming presentation titled, “COVID-19 USA – Lessons and new tools to improve workplace safety “at the Frontline Worker Safety in the Age of COVID-19: A Global Perspective” a Health Watch USAs Webinar on September 14, 2022, medical infrastructure, and monkeypox, Langya virus, among other topics.
“I don’t know whether we [the United States] think we’re exceptional when it comes to infectious disease, [but] we are not,” Birx told ICT®. “We’ve had higher fatalities, about 60% more fatalities in this country than the United Kingdom over the last 18 months because we didn’t use the tools that we had for COVID-19.”
Another way to correct the issues that the US has in the medical infrastructure is how those individuals in the medical community look at patient infection and loss. “Currently, if we treated every hospitalization and death as a programmatic failure, we would fix those issues, and we would change them,” Birx said. “That’s how we dealt with human immunodeficiency virus, tuberculosis, and malaria at the community level. We looked at every new infection and every loss from any of those infections disease is a failure of our programming.”