Just because we're done caring about an outbreak doesn't mean the outbreak is done with us.

Over the last year, we have watched something unsettling happen in plain sight. The quiet, active dismantling of the systems built to catch outbreaks early, coordinate a response, and keep hospitals and communities from getting overwhelmed.

Websites have been scrubbed, teams have been hollowed out. Early warning signals have gone silent, and at the exact same time, diseases that many of us haven't thought about since childhood, like measles, are being let back into the present, which really leaves a lot of people with the same question, said a little differently than usual.

If the safety net is being shredded, what do we do now?

My returning guest today is Dr. Nahid Bhadelia.

Dr. Bhadelia is the Founding Director of the BU Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, a board-certified infectious diseases physician, and an associate professor at the Boston University School of Medicine.

She served as the senior policy advisor for Global COVID-19 Response on the White House COVID-19 response team in 2022-2023, where she coordinated the US global vaccine donation programs and helped lead Project Next Gen, a $5 billion effort to develop next-generation vaccines and treatments for a pandemic prone coronaviruses.

Dr. Bhadelia also served as interim testing coordinator for the White House Impacts Response Team, and she's the founding director and co-founder of BEACON, an open-source outbreak surveillance program.

Today, we're gonna try to make sense of what's being dismantled, what threats don't wait for politics to catch up, what's starting to fill the gaps and most importantly, what you can do right now to protect yourself, your family, and to help rebuild the public health infrastructure we all rely on whether we have to think about it or not.

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INI Book Club:

Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green
Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

Get global health alerts from BEACON https://beaconbio.org/
Check out the impacts of new public and global health policies at Impact Counter https://www.impactcounter.com/
Track health trends in your community with PopHIVE https://www.pophive.org/
Check out the Vaccine Integrity Project https://vaxintegrity.cidrap.umn.edu/
Check out the Governors Public Health Alliance https://govsforhealth.org/

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Produced by Willow Beck
Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

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