While Debby Birx worked in the Army with Redfield, my impression of him has never been much better than "ideologue". When he took over CDC, the organization hemorrhaged experienced people who could have retired years before but were the basis for a lot of the good science. But it's not all Redfield's fault, although he didn't start turni…
While Debby Birx worked in the Army with Redfield, my impression of him has never been much better than "ideologue". When he took over CDC, the organization hemorrhaged experienced people who could have retired years before but were the basis for a lot of the good science. But it's not all Redfield's fault, although he didn't start turning the response around until it was obvious he couldn't ignore any longer, nor accept political direction. The directorship at CDC was transitioned to a political appointment over 20 years ago. It needs to go back to a professionally derived position. That could restore some confidence and autonomy to the group.
I learned, in the initial days of the AIDS outbreak that it was dangerous to claim, as a lot of us did, that, "This is only a disease of gay men." I'm concerned that we have to raise the alarm that there can and will be spill-over into the general population, as we saw with HIV. I remember the day we shifted from no precautions to universal precautions to enter a patient room (and at one point, to enter an entire ICU in my hospital) after one of our providers suffered a needle stick and became ill (no, it wasn't a short time... but with a doc in the ICU who wasn't a gay man, it started changing the complexion of the disease for us. The spill-over for HIV/AIDS wasn't immediate, but did occur.
Solely identifying MPV as a MSM disease will diminish the awareness in the rest of the population. I suspect there's already community cases that have escaped that subgroup (we know of 2 kids and a pregnant woman; how many more?) but since we're not up to speed on testing (again but it's better handled this time) it'll take a bit to establish R(0) and the initial case load.
While Debby Birx worked in the Army with Redfield, my impression of him has never been much better than "ideologue". When he took over CDC, the organization hemorrhaged experienced people who could have retired years before but were the basis for a lot of the good science. But it's not all Redfield's fault, although he didn't start turning the response around until it was obvious he couldn't ignore any longer, nor accept political direction. The directorship at CDC was transitioned to a political appointment over 20 years ago. It needs to go back to a professionally derived position. That could restore some confidence and autonomy to the group.
I learned, in the initial days of the AIDS outbreak that it was dangerous to claim, as a lot of us did, that, "This is only a disease of gay men." I'm concerned that we have to raise the alarm that there can and will be spill-over into the general population, as we saw with HIV. I remember the day we shifted from no precautions to universal precautions to enter a patient room (and at one point, to enter an entire ICU in my hospital) after one of our providers suffered a needle stick and became ill (no, it wasn't a short time... but with a doc in the ICU who wasn't a gay man, it started changing the complexion of the disease for us. The spill-over for HIV/AIDS wasn't immediate, but did occur.
Solely identifying MPV as a MSM disease will diminish the awareness in the rest of the population. I suspect there's already community cases that have escaped that subgroup (we know of 2 kids and a pregnant woman; how many more?) but since we're not up to speed on testing (again but it's better handled this time) it'll take a bit to establish R(0) and the initial case load.
Couldn't agree more as they say..