Federal Public Health Service Standards Needed

Source of map: Wunderground using data from the CDC
How much of the pattern is due to the distribution of flu
and how much to the quality of the reporting?

Source article: "Ill From Food? Investigations Vary by State," GARDINER HARRIS, The New York Times, April 19, 2009.

We have a national Center for Disease Control, but we also have 3,000 federal, state and local health departments that are, for the most part, poorly financed, poorly trained and disconnected. As a result most communicable disease usually goes unreported, or reported only partially and often tardily.

I would not think that we should have a federal monopoly on public health programs nor a huge federal public health service. On the other hand, the federal government could define standards that state and local public health services would be required to meet.

The standards could be placed on public health service inputs, such as numbers of epidemiologists, public health physicians and public health nurses per 1000 population. Perhaps better would be standards of quality and service.

I suspect that epidemiological models could do a very good job of predicting the incidence of reportable disease problems now. Perhaps a system that required offices to defend apparent underreporting would work. The better the reporting became, the more accurate the predictive models would become.