Mother Jones  |  December 10, 2014

“The US health system should not respond by creating a disease silo that focuses solely on Ebola,” professors Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University and William Foege of Emory University wrote in an opinion piece with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), which was published last month on the website of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The trio called for “sustained and flexible enhancement” of the American public health system and lauded Obama’s request for potentially making such an improvement possible.

The Ebola treatment centers proposed in Obama’s request would be “essential” to responding to new infectious threats, “such as a rapidly moving pandemic influenza or bioterror event,” they said.

In an email, Gostin said that while these sorts of improvements are needed to prepare for a number of diseases, it was the Ebola outbreak that made them “politically possible.”

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