07 Dec CDC Launches Global Action Healthcare Network To Detect and Respond to Infectious Disease Threats

MedicalResearch.com Interview with:

Michael Craig

Michael Craig MPP
Director, Antibiotic Resistance Coordination and Strategy
CDC 

MedicalResearch.com: What is the mission of the Global Action in Healthcare Network (GAIHN)? How will it work to coordinate detection and response efforts across multiple countries and cultures? 

• Health care can often be an epicenter of infectious disease outbreaks that can spread within a facility, between facilities, and beyond the facility into the community. CDC’s Global Action in Healthcare Network (GAIHN) consists of countries, healthcare facilities, and public health partners working together to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats in the healthcare setting. GAIHN will target health care threats like antimicrobial-resistant infections, healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), and COVID-19 through infection prevention and control.
• Close coordination across experts at CDC, and strong relationships and communications with our funded partners, international colleagues, ministries of health and country leadership, will make GAIHN successful and ensure collaboration, minimize duplication, and maximize advancements across countries and cultures.
• Find more information about the 2021 GAIHN projects: https://www.cdc.gov/infectioncontrol/global/GAIHN.html 

MedicalResearch.com: What is the Global AR Laboratory and Response Network? What is its role in the detection of new SARS variants or other emerging infections?

• CDC’s Global AR Laboratory and Response Network, modeled after CDC’s successful U.S. AR Lab Network, is a first-of-its-kind global network to improve the detection of antibiotic-resistant threats and prevent their spread no matter where they occur—in health care, the community, or the environment (e.g., water and soil).
• The Global AR Lab & Response Network will fill critical detection gaps worldwide, helping public health experts more rapidly identify new types of resistance (resistance genes or pathogens), while also responding on-the-ground to antibiotic-resistant health care, enteric, fungal, sexually transmitted, and invasive bacterial and respiratory pathogens.
• The Global AR Lab & Response Network will not detect SARS-CoV-2, but another new program (CDC’s Global Action in Healthcare Network) will respond with infection prevention as COVID-19 infections occur or are treated within healthcare facilities.
• Find more information about the 2021 Global AR Lab & Response Network projects: https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/ar-lab-networks/global.html

MedicalResearch.com: What should readers take away from your report?

• These networks fill critical gaps worldwide and will undoubtedly help us save lives and prevent infections. Even if patients survive threats like antibiotic-resistant or COVID-19 infections, their impact can be long lasting and devastating. With these networks, we’re establishing sentinel sites that can respond rapidly before threats have the chance to spread like wildfire across the globe. We will be successful because of our strong partnerships with these nearly 30 partners and because we’re leveraging proven, simple public health techniques—rapid detection and infection prevention and control—that have been successful time and again. We can’t stop a threat we aren’t aware of; these investments across more than 50 countries is an important step in the right direction to combat antimicrobial resistance and healthcare threats.

MedicalResearch.com: Is there anything else you would like to add? 

• CDC is also investing in short-term global AR innovation research projects for the first time, working with investigators to identify new public health solutions to prevent antimicrobial-resistant infections and their spread. Findings from the global AR innovation projects may later be integrated into the Global AR Lab & Response Network to transform the global response to AR across One Health.
• Global AR Innovative Research Projects – https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/solutions-initiative/innovations-to-slow-ar/projects.html

Press release:

CDC Launches Two Global Networks, Awards $22 Million to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance and Infectious Diseases | CDC Online Newsroom | CDC

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Last Updated on December 8, 2021 by Marie Benz MD FAAD