Some stories have a life of their own. An article co-authored by Abt’s Lauren Olsho on unvaccinated first responders’ increased COVID-19 risk first appeared in JAMA Network Open in July. It’s still getting press play. In September, it appeared in a dozen outlets, including USA Today, Yahoo!, UPI.com, The Washington Times, and Breitbart.
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Infectious Diseases & Global Health Security in North America
How to Avoid a Respiratory Disease Tripledemic
Getting RSV, COVID-19, and flu vaccinations is the best way to protect yourself and mitigate the odds of an epidemic of all three respiratory diseases at the same time.
Beyond COVID-19: What Global Health Security Will Look Like
As leaders focus on pandemics and global health security, they should look at three related items: other diseases, social determinants of health, and logistics.
A Concise, Health Service Coverage Index for Monitoring Progress Towards Universal Health Coverage
There is a growing international commitment to universal health coverage (UHC), but limited means to determine progress towards that goal. The authors developed a practical index for capturing health service coverage – a critical dimension of UHC -- that was more inclusive than previous methods.The approach moved beyond common indicators of service coverage focused on infectious diseases and maternal and child health, to include information on necessary health inputs. The resulting, balanced, composite index of health service coverage demonstrated promise as a metric, likely to discriminate coverage levels between countries and regions. An important number of service provision indicators were correlated, therefore a reduced set of services performed well as a proxy for the full set of available indicators. This parsimonious index is a start toward simplifying the task of policy-makers monitoring progress on a key domain of universal health coverage.
CDC / CFA Demographic Social Comorbidities Table (DSCT)
The nation’s ability to identify and respond to outbreaks relies on access to high-quality and timely data for disease surveillance.