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Operationalizing Public Health Skills to Resource Poor Settings: Is This the Achilles Heel in the Ebola Epidemic Campaign?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2014

Frederick M. Burkle Jr
Frederick M. Burkle Jr*
Affiliation:
Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC.
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Abstract

Sustainable approaches to crises, especially non-trauma-related public health emergencies, are severely lacking. At present, the Ebola crisis is defining the operational public health skill sets for infectious disease epidemics that are not widely known or appreciated. Indigenous and foreign medical teams will need to adapt to build competency-based curriculum and standards of care for the future that concentrate on public health emergencies. Only by adjusting and adapting specific operational public health skill sets to resource poor environments will it be possible to provide sustainable prevention and preparedness initiatives that work well across cultures and borders.(Diaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2014;0:1-3)

Keywords

Ebolapublic health emergenciesepidemiologydisaster medicineepidemicsresource poor settingsglobal healthglobal health security
Type
Commentaries
Information
Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 44 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, Inc. 2014 

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