New Report Identifies Shortage Of Epidemiologists In Big City Health Departments A new report by the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC) has found that 28% of their jurisdictions do not have a lead epidemiologist to oversee epidemiology activities. Altogether, the cities in the Coalition represent 62 million persons or about 1 in 5 Americans. A total of 26 of the 30 Coalition Health Departments responded to the survey of epidemiology capacity carried out from January to May 2021.
need to increase staff by 602 (47%) over the number of 1,284 epidemiologists now serving. Since the time of the last report in 2017, the number of epidemiologists has increased 18%, much less than the increase needed to reach full capacity as measured now. According to Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the BCHC, “The headline really is that big city health departments are in dire need of additional epidemiologist staffing,”. Speaking with Infectious Disease Special Edition she added “The
Shortfall To reach full epidemiology capacity, the big city health departments would
- Shortage con't on page 2
On The Light Side Multiple Epidemiologists Enter New Haiku Contest To Share Insights From The COVID-19 Pandemic Read a Sample of Entries A new Haiku contest designed to bring forth some of insights and observations about the impact of the COVID pandemic on epidemiology and epidemiologists has attracted scores of epidemiology entrants and an even larger number of individual haikus with some readers submitting multiple entries. March 2022
Our contest seeks to capture the insights which epidemiologists have garnered both positive and the negative as a result of the unprecedented attention on epidemiology during the pandemic. - Haiku cont'd on page 3 •
Volume Forty Three •
Number Three
In This Issue -4Study on Harassment of Epidemiologists -6White House Updates Covid-19 Plan -7Notes On People -9Near Term Epi Event Calendar -11Marketplace This Month