University Times

Pitt’s Center for Public Health Preparedness, part of the Graduate School of Public Health, and the Center for Rural Health Practice at the Bradford campus, along with other collaborators, this month released an independent report highlighting the challenges and concerns of rural public health preparedness.

The report explores rural America’s vulnerability to bioterrorism and other serious public health emergency threats such as storms and other natural disasters. The report, which is available online at: www.upb.pitt.edu/crhp, is the result of a conference held in September 2004 in St. Paul, Minn.

“The conference did not focus exclusively upon bioterrorism,” said Paul Campbell, from the Harvard School of Public Health, one of the more than 80 public health preparedness leaders from across the nation who met to identify existing weaknesses facing rural public health preparedness, and to suggest recommendations and strategies on how to make rural America safer.

“We need to be prepared for the full range of public health emergencies, including weather events such as ice storms and hurricanes, and emerging diseases like SARS that do not result from terrorist actions,” Campbell said.

Joshua Frances, also from the Harvard School of Public Health Center for Public Health Preparedness, added, “Though many perceive rural areas to be just farmland, plains and dense forest, much of the nation’s water supply, food supply and critical industries — power plants and water treatment facilities — are located in rural areas. They pose a unique challenge to protection from terrorism and public health emergencies.”

The report includes strategies and recommendations on how to tackle the preparedness issues that face rural America, citing the need to strengthen public health and health care systems; lobbying policy makers at the federal, state and local levels to ensure the financial and human resources required to achieve an adequate state of readiness, and the need for public health and health care leaders in rural areas to work together to ensure that emergency preparedness is achieved in a cost-effective manner.

“We live in a mobile and rapidly changing society so that our fates are woven together,” said Michael Meit, director of Pitt’s Center for Rural Health Practice at Bradford and co-director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness. “Clearly urban America is in need of additional resources, but if these come at the expense of rural America we will have achieved little in building a more secure nation. The bottom line is this: If rural America is at risk, then everyone is at risk.”