POSITION STATEMENT

Recent and unfortunate events across the United States have brought into focus the need for health departments to cultivate the skills necessary to respond to a community disaster that impacts the public’s health, including bioterrorism. 

The challenge, and potentially the great strength, of bioterrorism preparedness is that it requires a combination of the resources and skills of public health with those of other public safety and emergency preparedness disciplines. Local health departments are working in conjunction with other community-based response agencies to maximize all resources for preparedness and response. The Kentucky Health Departments Association recognizes the current efforts, yet limited resources, of each of the local health departments in the Commonwealth in developing and refining our infrastructure to address disaster response. 

Public Health and Local Health Departments should possess certain core capacities that address bioterrorism, specifically, and disaster response, in general. 

These core capacities consist of four major areas, within which are many more specific elements that are not appropriate for the scope of this paper.  The four major areas are: 

·        Surveillance and epidemiologic investigation, which requires monitoring community health status to detect the presence of bioterrorism agents and to characterize the public health threat or emergency, soon to be greatly enhanced by the Kentucky Electronic Disease Surveillance System’s ability to securely transfer needed health data over the Internet; 

·        Laboratory capacity to identify, rule out, confirm and characterize biological threat agents;

·        Communication, which includes collection, analysis and communication of information among the response community, decision-makers and the general public during a public health emergency. This capacity also includes the local public health agency’s core responsibilities of education and assurance as well as the development of local Health Alert Networks nationwide; and

·        Public health intervention, which includes advance planning, coordination of emergency response and implementation of emergency measures to control and contain an outbreak. This involves the integration of public health expertise and activities with that of other emergency response agencies.

For any local health department to fully achieve these core capacities, it must have a fundamental infrastructure of trained people, equipment, facilities and systems The Kentucky Health Departments Association supports appropriate funding to achieve and maintain this basic level of infrastructure, preparedness and security for all Kentuckians.   

Approved by membership Nov. 17, 2004.