Under the guidance of the new Dallas County Emergency Management coordinator, A. J. Seely, the Dallas County Health Department recently participated in a tabletop emergency exercise.
The purpose of the drill was to learn and practice how your Health Department would handle a health-related emergency.
The drill scenario was a local high school student diagnosed with measles. A case of measles isn’t a public health disaster in itself, but the scenario stated that this student had participated with her team at a Veteran’s Auditorium event and gone shopping at the Jordan Creek mall while she was contagious. Her teammates had also been to multiple public locations after being exposed to measles.
The Dallas County Health Department staff worked through this exercise, making choices on how to handle a quickly spreading communicable disease in our county. Decisions were made concerning treating currently ill persons, monitoring exposed persons and preventing further spread of the deadly disease among the population.
Emergency preparedness isn’t just floods and tornados. Health-related emergencies potentially kill or permanently disable great numbers of people. Examples include influenza epidemics and the current outbreak of a mysterious disease with polio-like symptoms, called acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), which has been confirmed in 22 U.S. states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Question for you: How are you reducing the spread of disease?
Ann Cochran is the health navigation coordinator in the Dallas County Public Health Department.
