Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman today introduced legislation aimed at strengthening the federal government’s monitoring and reporting of infectious diseases – most recently the H1N1 flu outbreak.

Bingaman’s “Strengthening America’s Public Health System Act”, seeks to improve electronic disease surveillance and reporting so that all state and local health departments and public health laboratories can readily and seamlessly receive, monitor, and report infectious diseases. Additionally, it would help strengthen national surveillance and reporting of infectious diseases and other conditions of public health importance.

“Currently, many local public health departments continue to rely on paper-based systems and have not yet fully benefited from new technologies that could improve their work objectives.  This bill would help state and local health departments make necessary upgrades to help them enhance their surveillance of infectious diseases and quickly respond to outbreaks,” Bingaman said. 

Specifically, the bill would authorize the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) – through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)  to do the following:

• Establish the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity Grant Program to help public health agencies improve surveillance for, and response to, infectious diseases and other conditions.
• Authorizes a process for determining a list of nationally notifiable diseases and conditions and, creates a national committee to evaluate best practices in public health surveillance.
• Issue guidelines for public health entities relating to information systems to receive, monitor, and report infectious diseases and other such conditions;
• Address documented workforce shortages in state and local health departments in applied public health epidemiology and public health laboratory science and informatics;
• Provides for the expansion of applied epidemiology training programs;
• Requires the Secretary of HHS to adopt and use guidelines to develop improved standards and protocols for binational epidemiology, surveillance, laboratory analyses, and control of infectious diseases between the United States and Mexico.
• Establish a committee to evaluate best practices in public health surveillance and to assess systems needed for improving coordination among public health surveillance and monitoring systems.

Bingaman’s bill has been endorsed by the: American Association of Public Health Veterinarians, American Public Health Association, American Society for Microbiology, Association for Professionals in Infection Control & Epidemiology, Association of Public Health Laboratories, Association of Schools of Public Health, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, Infectious Diseases Society of America, National Association of County and City Health Officials, National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians, National Public Health Information Coalition, Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, and Trust for America’s Health.