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Preparation is Best Defense
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Business New Haven
12/9/2002
By: BNH
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For the first time ever, Yale will offer a course next semester on preparing for bioterrorism and other disasters. The offering is in response to requests by students following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"After the attack on September 11, 2001, I inserted a lecture about disaster response into the course on injury control," says Linda Degutis, associate professor in Yale's Department of Epidemiology & Public Health, associate professor of surgery and emergency medicine and associate clinical professor in the School of Nursing. "Then there was a student request for disaster planning and responses."
The course, "The Public Health Management of Disasters," is open to students studying in all subject areas and offered under the aegis of the Master's in Public Health program. The course examines preparedness and planning for a range of disasters, among them bioterrorism and weather-related disasters.
The course focuses on what public-health workers planning a response, or responding to a disaster, need to consider, such as surveillance for disease or injuries; gauging the severity of a disease or injury; and coordination of services, both immediately and over the long term.
There also is instruction about assessing the psychosocial impact of a disaster, collaborating between and among multiple agencies and professions, and deciding who is in command.
The class is fully enrolled at 35 students. Degutis says it will be offered every year. Next semester she and the co-director of the course, David Cone, associate professor of surgery and emergency medicine, will offer a seminar series that will bring in local, regional and national experts on bioterrorism and disaster preparedness.
Degutis says responses to bioterrorism differ from other disasters because a key concern is exposure and containing the exposure, for example, to smallpox.
"If someone develops a rash or fever or other symptoms of smallpox, they might go to their physicians' office, or they might go to the hospital," she says. "We have different responses for each scenario."
The advantage of being prepared for a disaster, she says, is having a system in place that works day-to-day with people who know one another. "We will already have the relationships, have defined who does what, and have decided who is in charge," Degutis says.
The attack on the World Trade Center towers was unforeseen, as was the degree of devastation and loss of life, yet the system in place worked, Degutis says. "There were a lot of people who were ready to do what needed to be done.
Nevertheless, "Some of those people [emergency medical responders] were not able to serve in those capacities because so few people survived."
In October, Yale and a number other Connecticut institutions formed a partnership to develop a statewide plan to train public health and medical workers about bioterrorism and emergency preparedness (BNH, October 28).
The group, the Connecticut Partnership for Public Health Workforce Development, was awarded a $320,000 first-year contract by the state's Department of Public Health (DPH). The state received $12.5 million of $1 billion in funding from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention's Public Health Preparedness and Response to Bioterrorism Cooperative Agreement.
Target date for completion of that master training plan is March.
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