Pandemics, Public Health, and Political Transition

Hosted by Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences

Richard E. Besser, senior health and medical editor for ABC News and former acting director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), discusses the federal government’s response to the H1N1 influenza outbreak. He also shares the practical and political wisdom he gained while leading the CDC during the largest pandemic in forty years — while simultaneously reimagining and negotiating the organization’s role within a new presidential administration.

Besser says that his interim appointment at the CDC — which began the day after Barack Obama’s inauguration and ended in June — gave him the opportunity to expand the agency’s emergency-preparedness focus on “high-consequence, low-probability events” to include more routine public-health crises. He discusses the logistical factors that helped control the spread of swine flu during the spring, after it was first seen in California, Texas, and Mexico.

Besser also addresses the political aspects of crisis management, noting the CDC’s successes (convincing scared officials not to close the Mexico border) and failures (recommending school closures at the first sign of swine flu, a policy that was later rescinded). Ultimately, he says, consensus-building — among government agencies and with the public — is the key to crisis management, and to successful public health campaigns in general.

October 16, 2009, 3 p.m.

Sargent College

Video Length is 00:58:56.

About the Speaker:

As the senior health and medical editor for ABC News, Richard E. Besser provides on air and online analysis of medical issues. From January to June 2009, he was acting director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and acting administrator for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry, for which he received the Surgeon General's Medallion for leadership. Besser has worked for teh CDC in various capacities since 1991. He is a graduate of Williams College and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

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