Experts Wonder ‘Where Is The CDC?’ As A Hantavirus Outbreak Unfolds On A Cruise Ship

NEW YORK (AP) — There is no rapid deployment of disease researchers. There is no televised press conference to inform the public. Doctors are not given timely health warnings.

in the middle of something hantavirus epidemic including Americans and making headlines around the worldThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. government’s top public health agency, acted in an unusual way. missing in actionAccording to a number of experts.

“We seem to have things under very good control,” he told President Donald Trump in a statement to reporters Friday evening.

To the experts, situation The number of cases on a cruise ship did not increase because, unlike COVID-19, measles or flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. Last week, those who primarily dealt with the epidemic were not the United States, but health experts in other countries.

“The CDC is not even a player,” said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I’ve never seen this before.”

CDC actions did not gain momentum until late Friday.

Health officials confirmed that a team was being sent to Spain’s Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time to rendezvous with the Americans. They said a second team would go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to the University of Nebraska quarantine center for evaluation and monitoring. Also, CDC first health warning He advised US doctors about the possibility of imported cases.

At the first briefing held by phone for invited reporters only on Saturday, officials pledged to be transparent in providing information to the public but said the media could not name the speakers under rules established by aides to Surgeon General Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. They did not directly answer the question about whether American travelers could leave the university’s medical facility at any time.

Some experts have said the CDC’s diminished role in this epidemic is an indication that the agency is no longer the force in international health or the guardian of domestic health it once was.

CEO of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo said the hantavirus outbreak was “a ‘sentinel event’ that showed how well the country was prepared for a disease threat, and I am very sorry to say that we are not prepared at this time.”

Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man fell ill with a fever on a cruise ship sailing from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people fell ill, including the man’s wife and a German woman, who both died.

I had hantavirus first defined as the cause of illness in one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization took action and called it a pandemic on Monday. There were about two dozen Americans on board, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.

For decades, CDC has partnered with WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as the anchor for any international investigation; It has provided staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mysteries, develop ways to control it, and communicate to the public what it needs to know and how it should worry.

Such actions were a big reason why the CDC gained its reputation as the world’s leading public health agency.

But this time WHO was at the center. He made a risk assessment that told people that the epidemic was not a pandemic threat.

“I don’t think this is a major threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. But how this situation turned out “shows how hollow and dull the CDC is right now,” he said.

The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months when the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO. limited CDC scientists At times, he gave up talking to his international counterparts and embarked on a plan to build his own international public health network through one-on-one agreements with individual countries.

The administration laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health experts, including members of the agency’s ship sanitation program.

Kennedy while this was being played he said he was working “Refocusing CDC on infectious diseases, investing in innovation, and rebuilding trust through honesty and transparency.”

The CDC hasn’t been completely silent on the hantavirus.

The agency issued a brief statement on Wednesday saying the risk to the American public was “extremely low” and described the U.S. government as a “world leader in global health security.”

“Not only is this not helpful, it is actually harmful because the fundamental tenet of public health communication is humility,” Nuzzo said.

Acting director of the CDC, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, sent a message He said the agency has been touting its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities on social media. Arizona officials said this week they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who left the ship — a person who had no symptoms and was not considered contagious — had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC shared technical information.

Bhattacharya wrote that the CDC was also “monitoring the health status of all American passengers on the cruise and preparing medical support.”

But federal health officials have remained mostly tight-lipped and declined interview requests.

In interviews this week, some experts drew comparisons to an incident involving the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which docked in Japan in 2020 and was the scene of one of the first major COVID-19 outbreaks outside of China.

CDC sent personnel to the port, helped evacuate American passengers, I ran quarantinesA former CDC director, Dr. Tom Frieden said he shared genetic data on the virus, held public briefings in coordination with the WHO and Japan, and quickly released reports that “became the world’s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission.”

Some aspects of the international reaction to the Diamond Princess was criticized, and it did not stop the epidemic or stop the spread of COVID-19 around the world. But some experts say this isn’t due to the CDC’s lack of testing.

“CDC was right on top of this, very visible, very active in managing and containing it,” Gostin said, but the agency’s work has now been delayed and suppressed.

Instead of working with nearly all the world’s countries through the World Health Organization, the Trump administration has pursued bilateral health agreements with individual countries for information sharing, public health support and what it describes as “the introduction of innovative American technologies.” Approximately 30 agreements are currently in force.

That’s not enough, Gostin said. “It is not possible to cover up a global health crisis by making one-to-one agreements with the countries here,” he said.

Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York, Darlene Superville in Washington and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico contributed to this report.

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