By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, May 16, 2013 – The Defense Department supports U.S.
global health activities because such efforts as preventing and
containing lethal outbreaks align with DOD’s mission to help ensure
geopolitical stability and security, a senior defense official said here
today.
Kathleen H. Hicks, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for
policy, discussed DOD’s role in global health here before an audience at
the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a private health-policy analysis
and research organization.
“DOD performs an important role in
supporting the U.S. interagency response to human-made and natural
disasters. … In such situations, our military draws upon its incredible
logistical capabilities -- providing air and sea transport for
medicines, equipment and personnel,” Hicks said.
DOD also serves
the public health mission by maintaining an international network of
laboratories and technologies, therapies and medical expertise, she
added, all of which can be used in support of public-health efforts in
the United States and abroad.
In its support of global public
health activities, Hicks said, DOD must recognize the roles of federal
agencies such as the State Department and the U.S. Agency for
International Development, and recognize the importance of helping
partner countries take the lead in protecting the health of their own
people.
“We at DOD need templates to understand how to best
engage with our fellow government agencies and our foreign partners in
the complex and vital work of protecting public health in actual and
potential crisis situations,” Hicks noted.
Four years ago, Hicks
and two colleagues published an analysis of DOD’s global health
engagement activities. It addressed DOD’s role in global health,
including the effect of the department’s health activities on national
and regional security, the principal deputy undersecretary said.
“That paper’s recommendations included creating a strategy for global
health engagement [and] a health-security cooperation plan to guide our
efforts to build the public health and medical capacity of partner
militaries,” she said.
Above all, Hicks added, “our analysis
underscored the importance of ensuring that we do a better job of
synchronizing our efforts, not only with our fellow government agencies
but also among our own commands and components worldwide.”
Since
the study was published, she said, there have been improvements in DOD
coordination with the State Department and USAID, coordination within
DOD, and incorporating humanitarian and global health scenarios in
military exercises.
Over the past year, Hicks added, the
department has made significant strides in establishing measures of
effectiveness for its global-health-related activities.
“Already
in 2013,” she added, “there have been at least two noteworthy examples
of how we used global-health engagement to help partner nations address
an urgent health need.”
The first occurred after a January
nightclub fire in Santa Maria, Brazil, that killed 241 people, the
principal deputy undersecretary said.
Brazil’s Ministry of Health
put out an urgent request to the U.S. government for medicine kits that
could treat victims suffering from cyanide toxicity due to inhaling
fumes from burning acoustic foam.
After determining that no other
agency could respond in time to help, she said, U.S. Southern Command
coordinated transport of the medication from St. Louis to Brazil via
Miami by working with Miami-Dade aviation officials, the Transportation
Security Administration and American Airlines, which flew the medicine
to Brazil free of charge.
“This was a great example of public and
private collaboration,” Hicks said, “exactly the kind of collaboration
we are likely to need as we continue to respond to urgent crises of all
kinds.”
In April, another health emergency occurred after a
measles outbreak in Georgia. Responding to a request from that nation’s
Health Ministry to the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, the Defense Department
funded 75,000 emergency vaccinations. UNICEF handled the procurement and
the Georgian National Center for Disease Control distributed the
vaccine, she said.
“While we need to continue to work with our
partners to hone our responses to such crises, we also need to plan for
future challenges,” Hicks said, adding that an excellent example is an
upcoming event sponsored by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations,
or ASEAN.
The Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster
Relief/Military Medicine Field Training Exercise will take place in June
in Brunei and include 18 countries from Southeast Asia and elsewhere,
including the United States.
It also will include an exchange of
U.S. and Chinese medical officers, she noted. Hicks said three U.S.
officers will spend the exercise aboard a Chinese ship, and three
Chinese medical officers will be assigned to a U.S. medical treatment
facility, “[working] together in advancing a global good: the health of
the world’s citizens.”
To counter diseases and other threats to public health, Hicks said, the United States teams with countries worldwide.
The Defense HIV/AIDS Prevention Program, for example, is a
military-to-military health-engagement program with a direct effect on
security, she said.
Over the past four years, Hicks added, in
collaboration with the Naval Medical Center San Diego and partner
universities, the program has trained providers in 50 militaries around
the world and helped strengthen HIV-prevention programs in the trainees’
home countries.
Last summer the program hosted a major
international military HIV/AIDS conference, bringing together military
representatives from 75 countries, along with many government agencies
and international organizations, she said.
The focus on infectious
diseases has been a hallmark of DOD international public-health efforts
over the past decade, Hicks said, but the department should consider
expanding its efforts to include health concerns like malnutrition and
disrupted access to clean water.
“The expertise and
responsibility for dealing with these conditions obviously falls well
outside the Department of Defense,” she said. “However, we at the
Pentagon do have a legitimate interest in the degree to which these
conditions impair the security and stability of key countries.”
Hicks said a 2008 National Intelligence Council study found that while
noninfectious conditions may not present direct threats to U.S.
interests, they can have wide-ranging effects on global health.
According to the study, she said, the United States should expand the
focus of its global health program to include noncommunicable diseases,
neglected tropical diseases, malnutrition and maternal and child health
and mortality.
“Shifting DOD’s global health engagement
activities more in favor of building the public health capacity of
partner nations’ militaries, and toward synchronizing our efforts with
the State Department and its health diplomacy and USAID’s health
development efforts,” Hicks added, “would create a synergy beneficial to
global health and potentially beneficial to global and national
security.”
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