Coming Plague Journalist Tackles Public Health Infrastructures in New Book
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett would like to see public health become a "mom and apple pie" issue so fundamental to basic human rights that its absence would be morally unacceptable. And yet, she says, public health systems either do not exist or are woefully inadequate in many countries in an age when maladies such as bubonic plague have returned and new diseases such as Ebola have emerged.
Garrett introduced her new book Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health to a packed Snyder Auditorium on Monday, September 11. The event was sponsored by the Center for Health Communication and introduced by Dean Barry Bloom.
Now
a reporter for Newsday, Garrett is a familiar face to HSPH members.
In 1992, she came to the school for a year on a journalism research fellowship
that allowed her to think about public health issues in broader terms
than she could in a bustling newsroom, she said. After the fellowship,
she published the well-received The Coming Plague, a gripping non-fiction
chronicle of emerging diseases. In her new book, Garrett expands her focus
to include the infrastructures of public health systems.
She began her lecture with a sobering list of death and infection rates from different diseases: 3 million deaths last year from malaria, 100 countries in which tuberculosis cases have been confirmed, 100 million current cases of dengue fever.
"Why is the world not in a state of panic and outrage?" asked Garrett. "Because these are slow-motion epidemics."
Garrett warned of future faster killers that will emerge in a world with shambling public health infrastructures. The key to fighting these killers and other epidemics will be the globalization of public health resources, she said.
She used images from a slide presentation to document specific examples of public health crises around the world and official responses to the problems. One slide showed the first victim of the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire in 1995 and his family. Everyone in the picture eventually succumbed to the disease, said Garrett, but the world would not have learned of the outbreak if it had not been for a rambling daisy chain of telephone calls and letters that reached a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva.
An outbreak of pneumonic plague in India in 1994 became a political tool after officials blamed Pakistan for unleashing the disease in a plot to kill Indians. WHO representatives issued some general press releases, said Garrett, but they did not step in quickly with reassurances that the plague could be contained with simple antibiotics and a plan to control the outbreak.
In the Odessa region of Ukraine, hundreds of teenagers gather daily in large fields to inject into their veins home-made drugs made of poppy extracts and other substances. The fields become littered with used hypodermic needles that are often picked up by other teens who inject themselves and their friends with the dirty needles. HIV rates predictably have risen dramatically.
Garrett used these striking examples as a call to action for public health officials and students. She said the phrase public health is being co-opted by drug companies that make impressive promises of tailored remedies for individual illnesses that Garrett suspects will be unaffordable to a majority of Americans. Looking at her audience, many of whom were new or returning students to the school, Garrett summed up, "Access and equity to the fruits of research is the real challenge of the future."
