The Other Deadly Threat

Congress has been shoveling the lion’s share of new health research dollars into programs to strengthen the nation’s bulwarks against biological and chemical terrorism.

In recent weeks, however, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been rightly trying to drum up support for more funding to fight other ominous public health threats: the rapid rise of infectious diseases and chronic diseases in recent years.

The recent arrival of the West Nile virus in the Washington, D.C., area is only now waking up legislators to the threat posed by infectious diseases.

The virus, virtually unknown in the Western Hemisphere until three years ago, usually causes a mild, fever-like illness. However, it produces potentially fatal encephalitis in about one out of every 150 cases. The number of Americans afflicted by the virus, which scientists think may have arrived in the United States in the early 1980s when Asian tiger mosquitoes traveled in tire casings from Japan to Houston, has jumped from 160 to 371 in the last week and a half.

Meanwhile, some chronic illnesses are indisputably soaring. In the last decade, for instance, the rate of asthma in U.S. children has increased 20%; in the last three years, multiple sclerosis in women has risen 50%. And yet, while chronic diseases are the leading killer in the United States, the nation lacks a countrywide effort to research and control them.

Congress needs to create national chronic disease tracking systems modeled along the lines of the widely respected California Birth Defects Monitoring System. That research group made headlines recently with its finding that mothers exposed to automobile exhaust in the Los Angeles area were disproportionately likely to give birth to children with congenital heart disease.

CDC Director Julie Gerberding, a former UC San Francisco epidemiologist, wants to significantly increase the CDC’s budget for monitoring birth defects as well as other chronic and infectious diseases.

Since assuming office last month, however, she has been facing an uphill battle. Groups like the conservative organization Concerned Women for America are lobbying against the budget increase, angry that Gerberding has identified chronic disease and social and environmental dangers like guns and air pollution as health hazards that are as important as bioterrorism.

When Congress returns from summer recess next month, it should recognize that Gerberding understands something her critics don’t: Protecting Americans against foreign threats, be they biological or chemical, starts with health tracking at home.

After all--as the Asian tiger mosquitoes’ suspected arrival in tires attests--in today’s highly mobile world, viruses and other deadly pathogens know no borders.