Public Health – Shift raises U.S. risk of infectious diseases
Knight Ridder – Having defeated the scourges of smallpox, tuberculosis and polio, U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart confidently told Congress in 1969 that it was time to “close the books on infectious diseases.”
Within a few years, U.S. public health research, funding and manpower, especially at the National Institutes of Health, shifted largely from infectious diseases to chronic ones such as cancer, heart disease and stroke.
Federal public hospitals that specialized in infectious diseases closed as the number of infectious disease courses at public health schools were slowly scaled back.
Decades later, as the nation prepares for a potential avian flu outbreak, those policy changes and complacency in the fight against public health threats have helped to make the United States even more vulnerable to a pandemic or bioterrorist attack.
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