The Alabama Department of Public Health recently announced the launch of a serious infectious disease response network in order to help identify and respond to potential outbreaks as they occur.
According to Mary McIntyre, chief medical officer for the Alabama Department of Public Health, the network was the result of two years of work and involved a lot of time and resources from hospitals, emergency medical service providers, and medical waste companies.
“Handling these diseases that are new to our health system is a complex process that involves many key players,” McIntyre said. “One of the more critical components is the identification and testing of individuals who may be carriers of the disease. For that, we have partnered with these three hospitals to serve as assessment centers in an effort to best focus our resources.”
The three hospitals, Huntsville Hospital, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital, and the University of South Alabama Medical Center in Mobile, will all serve as critical facets of the new network by assessing outbreaks as they are identified and recommending potential treatment options.
McIntyre said that if a highly-infectious disease occurs, patients meeting certain criteria who are identified by other hospitals or healthcare providers would be transferred to one of the network’s three assessment centers for further testing.
Should any individual test positive for a highly-infectious disease, that patient would be transferred to a regional treatment center, with the Emory University Medical Center in Atlanta, Georgia being the closest to the state of Alabama.
Each hospital also developed comprehensive diagnostic plans to protect staff and other patients from potential infection based on guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.