How can Canada enhance disease monitoring to compensate for our health cuts

Experts say, “Canada should do more to enhance health control systems because the discounts on American health institutions threaten to reach decisive monitoring data,” experts say. Editorial It was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) this week.

The editorial says that the cuts in the American Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, the Ministry of Health and Federal Humanitarian Services can strip Canada and other valuable health data.

“We have had decades -long contracts with diseases control centers and other organizations in the states,” said Dr. Shannon Charlemeos, a family doctor and editor of CMAJ. “Since these are dismantling, we will not have early warning systems.”

For example, when the MPOX virus erupted in the United States, Charleboard said that the Center for Disease Control officially comes to the Public Health Agency in Canada.

The authors say, “a crisis of infectious diseases in North America,” noting that the rates of syphilis and HIV in Canada, along with measles outbreaks and dependence of livestock due to bird flu.

“It is clear that we cannot control everything that is happening in the United States, but we can improve our own systems,” said co -author Dr. Yasmine Bawa, Public Health and Preventive Medicine at the University of Toronto University.

The United States must “light the fire” to work on observation

There have been calls for a long time to Canada to improve the monitoring of infectious diseases.

“This must really light a fire in light of policy makers to take seriously the issue of public health monitoring,” said Dr. Lorian Hardaster, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Medicine at Calgary University specializing in law and health policy.

She said that what the United States is doing in public health has a ripple effect.

“When you have this main global player, he is back away from public health monitoring and no longer puts public health resources the way they did historically, there is an invitation to others to intensify their game.”

Besides the official warnings, Charlemeos said that there are also informal links between the two countries that can help in planning. But with the demobilization of workers and discounts in the budget, now “we do not know who we call for this informal information”, in an interview with CBC Radio’s All this in one day.

What can be done here

In Canada, Hardakas said that one of the main obstacles to increasing monitoring is to obtain provinces and provinces for cooperation and data sharing in time, unified, Hardakas said.

“Many of them only need political will to achieve this, which is a great challenge,” she said.

But she said that there are tools that Canada can implement, including electronic medical records, and better monitoring of wastewater for antimicrobial resistance.

Hardakas said that this type of monitoring was done during the Covid-19 pandemic and that its escalation may be useful not only to monitor infectious diseases, but to public health in general.

She said that this would give politicians an early alert, instead of really waiting for things to snowball. “

Others, such as Charlelois, call for a national vaccine record, so that patients and medical professionals can follow the immunization and determine who is protected and from the exhibition.

“We have no national vaccine record and we do not meet our commitment to the World Health Organization on this,” said Charlebootes.

Wrong information also cross the borders

CMAJ editorial said that all this is exacerbated by another anxiety: misleading information.

The authors wrote: “People who live in Canada are exposed to border bleeding not only from microorganisms, but also from health situations, information and exposure to the biased American media,” the authors wrote.

Dr. Michael Jarm, infectious pathologist, said that wrong information can challenge the health system.

“People have stopped following the very effective control measures. Why did they stop? Because people tell them through social media that they do not follow them anymore,” Gardam said.

Through changes to health institutions in the United States, Gardam said that Canada and other countries will have a vacuum to fill it, but it will take some time and effort.

“We did not build our observation because the United States was our back,” he said. “If they no longer have your back anymore, you must create it yourself or you have to create new partnerships with other countries to do this.”