“We hope SARS doesn’t come back,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding,
the nation’s chief public health watchdog, noting “there is
reason to be optimistic” that if it does re-emerge, the disease
will be quickly identified, treated and contained.
But the CDC director added in a speech to the National
Press Club: “In
the history of my professional experience and I think probably in the history
of medicine, I can’t think of any infectious disease that emerged
once and then went away on its own. So I think we fully need to expect
that SARS is going to emerge somewhere someday and we need to be prepared
for that.”
The disease, a viral respiratory illness that spread rapidly across four
continents early this year and then was declared contained, infected more
than 8,000 people worldwide and killed 774, none in the United States.
Gerberding raised the possibility of quarantines where the disease breaks
out, but depending on the severity, they might be voluntary or even tailored
to specific situations, like allowing health care providers to go to work
and take care of patients but keeping them from contact with others.
Although a plan last year to vaccinate up to half a million
health workers with smallpox vaccine did not take hold, Gerberding said
federal and
local governments are now prepared to vaccinate everyone in the country
within
10 days. But she cautioned it is “a very dangerous perspective” to
believe there is no smallpox just because it has not been seen. The consequences
of such thinking, she said, “would be devastation to our country.”
Gerberding, who began her medical career treating some
of the first AIDS patients in San Francisco in the early 1980s, said
that disease is not
yet under control in the United States, with 40,000 new HIV infections
a year and an estimated 180,000 to 250,000 Americans who are infected
with the virus but don’t know it.
“We’ve got work to do,” she said. “It’s
disappointing that more than 20 years into the epidemic, we still don’t
know who has the infection.”
On other topics, she said:
-- Tuberculosis is at its lowest incidence ever in the United States but
it remains an international epidemic.
-- Vaccinating young people to prevent childhood diseases
is the nation’s
biggest public health success, but too many parents are refusing to let
their kids receive the shots, due to fears of side effects. “All
you have to do is look at what happens if you relax even for a year on
the vaccine-preventable diseases,” she said, citing an outbreak
of polio last year in India after vaccinations became less common.
