The Importance Of Public Health Infrastructure

As the final essential component to public health infrastructure, states must have the power to enforce laws and regulations by which all will abide in order to protect the health of their own citizens and those abroad. Standard protocols for infection prevention and emergency response must be followed, and the resources and training to carry out these measures must be regularly provided. In the U.S., the requirement of local health departments to report specific infectious pathogens has enhanced the response capacity to prevent the further spread of disease. Further, the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine of the U.S. has the legal authority to quarantine international travelers prior to U.S. entry, which has helped prevent the importation

Further, to maximize the effects of improved public health infrastructure on reducing the worldwide impact of infectious diseases, there must also be parallel progress in meeting other outstanding needs at the individual and societal level. These include increasing literacy rates and educational attainment among individuals to enhance understanding of public health messages; raising the status of women so that, in the context of controlling infectious diseases, access to effective treatment is equitable; and alleviating poverty so that the failure to pursue treatment is never the result of a compromise to reduce financial burden. These areas must be addressed alongside attempts to build public health

This will help ensure increased monitoring at the national and local levels of the sustained existence of the core components of public health infrastructure. For example, there will be greater accountability around the surveillance and reporting of health threats if entities enforcing these rules are locally based. Response plans to crises will also be more immediate as they could be prepared ahead of time, and they would be more tailored to specific community contexts. Critical time is often wasted during health crises in specifying response plans that are developed by non-local health organizations, and localized health organizations would alleviate this barrier to effective