IIn the spring of 2020, Mandy Cohen, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was serving as director of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services as the coronavirus pandemic raged around the world. One of the challenges she and her team had to face was the outdated state of data prevalent in public health and medicine. “The first thing we had to do was stop receiving laboratory data by fax machine,” Cohen said Monday in a speech with Institute President Michael Milken at Milken Institute 2024. He spoke at the 2017 World Congress.
“Yeah. It's embarrassing,” she continued, causing the audience to roar in surprise. Early in the pandemic, Cohen acknowledged that the state's lack of comprehensive data and data interoperability were major barriers to its response. On her stage at Milken, she pointed to that experience when discussing her intentions to improve CDC's data capabilities as director, a position she has held since July 2023.
“There's been a lot of investment, but we have to continue. So we're really focused this year on increasing electronic case reporting even more,” Cohen said. Told. “This will allow us to identify health threats more quickly. And we can do that. The technology exists. We just need to use it.”
This perspective is especially important as Cohen leads the CDC in the face of another potential public health threat: widespread outbreaks of avian influenza in cattle in the country. “I've spent a lot of time over the last few weeks working on bird flu,” Cohen said. “We need core competencies to respond to these health threats.”
However, Cohen and Milken did not discuss the CDC's role in monitoring the ongoing spread of the H5N1 influenza virus among U.S. dairy cows and dairy farm workers. The head of the CDC's influenza division says the risk to the general public is low at this time. . Milken did not ask additional questions about the response to the outbreak, including the slow release of national data on the spread and sequencing of the virus.
But more broadly, Cohen called on Congress to give the CDC more resources and authority to build data processing capacity. “Data is absolutely essential to protecting the health of this country,” she said, noting specifically the need for better data-sharing capabilities. International monitoring is also important. “Going back to bird flu, right? We're looking for genetic changes in viruses around the world,” she said. “We want to be able to identify it and stop it at its source.”
In addition to data on outbreaks, the agency is monitoring social media conversations and looking at ways to more quickly identify local crises before surveillance detects them.
But Cohen also called on the private sector, whose leaders filled the audience at the Milken Institute meeting in Los Angeles, to play a role in public health. “Companies, of course, want a productive, healthy workforce. So, especially if you're a large employer and self-insured, every penny counts when it comes to the health and well-being of your employees. It costs two pennies,” she says. she said. “Having a healthier workforce means more funds available for other parts of the business.”
To that end, she said, companies must promote vaccinations, promote immunizations for children against influenza, COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus, and ensure the mental health of employees. And more broadly, Cohen called on businesses to advocate for the importance of public health preparedness. “We see how the virus can bring us to our knees in an instant,” she says. “So just like we need to invest in the military to protect us, we also need to invest in public health to protect us.”