Health care organization strategies for disease prevention and development

Disease Prevention Strategies

For as long as human beings have fallen ill and succumbed to the ravages of disease, society has struggled to comprehend the invisible menace of microbial germs. The spread of infectious disease from person to person, from home to home, and within entire communities, has always wreaked havoc on humanity, and the field of medicine has struggled to counter the consequences of passable infections. From the Black Death of the 14th century in which over 25 million Europeans, or a third of the continent's total population, were felled by an outbreak of bubonic plague, to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that claimed more than 50 million lives globally (Fee, Brown, Lazarus & Theerman, 2001), infectious diseases have managed to adapt to medical advances while becoming increasingly virulent. Even with the major technological advances afforded to modern medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that infectious diseases represent one of the greatest threats to human life on the planet, because "the enormous diversity of microbes combined with their ability to evolve and adapt to changing populations, environments, practices, and technologies creates ongoing threats to health and continually challenges our ability to prevent and control disease" (Frieden & Khabbaz, 2011).

To combat the continual threat of infectious disease, federal agencies like the CDC and independent laboratories within health care organizations have untied to pursue a fundamental strategic shift. Rather than simply act as passive observers, studying the effects of diseases like smallpox and influenza on actual patients, modern medical researchers have devised methods by which diseases can be created and controlled under lab conditions, enabling them to explore a pathogen on a genetic level. The wave of Anthrax attacks which followed the September 11th tragedy turned infectious disease into a touchstone for politicians and the public alike, and today there are a "growing number of germ laboratories financed from the $14.5 billion in federal money spent on civilian biodefense since 2001" (Shane, 2005). Among the most prominent and productive of these emerging germ laboratories is the National Biocontainment Laboratory located in Galveston, Texas, which was designed specifically to "develop drugs and vaccines to protect not only against bioterror agents but also such natural emerging diseases as SARS and West Nile virus" (Shane, 2005), and carries the maximum Biosafety Level 4 designation.