Category: response

Assessing Community Needs in Real-time

Group photo of a Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response (CASPER) Team in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

What if there was a way to evaluate the needs of a community after a natural disaster? Or understand a community’s attitudes and beliefs about a specific public health behavior? Enter CASPER: Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response, a tool for health departments and public health professionals to assess community needs in real-time. What Read More >

Posted on by Amy Helene Schnall, Epidemiologist, Disaster Epidemiology and Response Team, National Center for Environmental Health3 CommentsTags , , , , , , ,

Partner, Train, Respond: Increasing Global Emergency Management Capacity

People walking a busy street in Zanzibar.

Countries in Africa are no strangers to major disease outbreaks that can result in illness and death of millions of people.  In the past two years alone the continent has experienced infectious disease outbreaks of cholera, meningitis, Ebola Virus Disease, Lassa fever, and Yellow fever, and other public health emergencies such as drought and famine. Read More >

Posted on by Loretta Jackson Brown, PhD, RN, Health Communication Specialist and Meredith Pinto, MPH, Health Scientist1 CommentTags , , , , , , , , , , ,

Building the Future Preparedness and Response Workforce

Woman typing

 When I think about public health preparedness and response I ask myself three questions: Who provides the infrastructure to train public health responders? Where do they learn what they know? Who helps a responder fulfill their mission? The answers to these questions may rest in the TRAIN Learning Network (TRAIN). After the September 11th terrorist Read More >

Posted on by Ilya Plotkin, Assistant Director, TRAIN Learning Network, Public Health FoundationLeave a commentTags , , , , , , ,

Ebola Response: Year in Review

A person washing their hands at a water station in West Africa

Throughout the month of December, Public Health Matters is conducting a series of year-in-review posts of some of the most impactful disease outbreaks of 2015. These posts will give you a glimpse of the work CDC is doing to prevent, identify, and respond to public health threats. Getting to Zero Getting to Zero was a Read More >

Posted on by Blog Administrator1 CommentTags , , , , , , , ,

Disease Detection: Laboratories on the front lines

Microsopic view of anthrax spores

You can’t respond to threats if you don’t know what they are, which is one reason that laboratories play such an important role in public health. Public health laboratories have helped detect all kinds of threats to the public’s health; including anthrax, monkey pox, novel flu viruses, and foodborne disease outbreaks caused by germs like Read More >

Posted on by Ali S. Khan8 CommentsTags , , , , , , ,