CDC Global Health

Description

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)’s Center for Global Health (CGH) coordinates global health activities across the agency and works to save lives, reduce disease, and improve health around the world. CGH ensures CDC experts are on the frontlines fighting major health threats—including Ebola, HIV, TB, polio, measles, and malaria—while training disease detectives around the globe to track, respond to, and eliminate outbreaks before they become epidemics.

What does it buy?

Funding supports CGH’s activities to help countries identify and stop health threats close to the source—both anticipated and otherwise. It allows the CDC to respond rapidly in the case of an outbreak, accurately track global health threats travelers bring into the U.S., and protect Americans through research and development of diagnostics, drugs, and other technologies to combat diseases. Funding also supports CGH’s efforts to address the severe worldwide shortage of a global public health workforce and build critical relationships with ministries of health and other partners to work towards U.S. goals such as eradicating polio and measles.

Why is it important?

• CGH conducts vital surveillance and response activities to prevent epidemics and protect U.S. and global health. The CDC monitors 30 to 40 potential health threats each day. Since 2006, CGH has responded to over 2,000 disease outbreaks and health emergencies, including Ebola, Zika, MERS-CoV, and avian influenza.
• CGH’s global polio immunization work has made incredible strides toward a polio-free future. 80% of the world’s population now lives in certified polio-free regions. There has been a 99% reduction in wild polio cases, and there are only three countries where wild poliovirus remains.
• CGH is a key partner of the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) and PEPFAR, co-implementing programs on the ground and evaluating and improving the effectiveness of existing health interventions.
• CGH’s global health security investments have helped reduce disease outbreak response time in Cameroon from eight weeks to just 24 hours.
• CGH is developing new cost-effective innovations to address gaps in diagnostic testing and surveillance, including a rapid, point-of-care HIV test to distinguish new and long-term infection and a multiplex test that detects antibodies for more than 35 viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases using a single drop of blood.

Why should Americans care?

• Protecting America’s economy and national security means safeguarding against disease outbreaks. In the fight against infectious diseases, American travel, trade, and jobs are at stake. CGH works to prevent, detect, and respond to these public health threats before they reach U.S. shores.
• CGH’s work protects overseas demand for U.S. exports that support millions of jobs in sectors like agriculture, manufacturing, and natural resource extraction.

What more could be done?

• Growing drug resistance threatens progress against global killers such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB. Insecticide resistance challenges our ability to combat malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases. Additional investment for disease surveillance and research is key to monitoring and understanding the scale of these problems and developing, evaluating, and deploying interventions.
• Additional investment could grow global health security programming and prevent the rollback of CDC efforts in 39 priority counties.
• Within the CDC Global Health Account, an increase to the Global Public Health Protection line above the FY 2020 Senate committee mark of $208.2 million and an appropriation of $100 million to the CDC Infectious Disease Rapid Response Fund is needed to ensure a quick response to outbreaks is adequately resourced.
• An increase in funding could strengthen CGH’s partnership in implementing PEPFAR and PMI, which are critical to expanding the number of patients receiving treatment and increasing evaluation, research, and development. Additional investment would also strengthen CGH’s global TB program with a focus on TB elimination programs in highly burdened countries