Comments
HEALTH PREPAREDNESS - Californians know how to live with risk. We retrofit buildings for earthquakes, clear brush before wildfire season and prepare evacuation routes before smoke fills the sky.
Infectious-disease preparedness deserves the same steady attention, not because California has failed, but because the work is never finished.
California is not starting from zero. State and county public-health workers have done difficult, often underappreciated work before, during and after COVID-19. The California Department of Public Health has an infectious-disease preparedness office, a health-alert network, laboratory capacity, vaccination campaigns and expanding surveillance tools, including wastewater monitoring.
Those efforts deserve more than applause after emergencies; they deserve support between them.
COVID-19 taught us that hospitals, schools, workplaces, farms, airports and families are all part of public-health infrastructure. Since then, monkeypox (mpox), H5N1 bird flu, dengue, hantavirus and the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda have reminded us that the next threat may not look like the last one.
These diseases are not the same. Ebola is not COVID-19. Hantavirus is not measles. Dengue is not mpox. Each spreads differently and demands a different response. That is why preparedness must be flexible. In a connected world, infections can emerge quickly, move across borders and test systems that are already stretched.
A Nature analysis of 335 emerging infectious-disease events from 1940 to 2004 found that such events increased over time after accounting for reporting bias, and that most were zoonotic, meaning they originated in animals. California sits at the intersection of many of those risks: global airports and ports, dense cities, agriculture, dairy production, wildland recreation, expanding mosquito habitats and unequal access to care.
For Los Angeles, the argument is especially concrete. A region with international travel, ports, entertainment venues, universities, hospitals, schools, shelters and large workforces cannot separate local health from global movement. Southern California has already seen how travel-associated infections and local conditions can intersect; a CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases report described 14 locally acquired dengue cases in Los Angeles County from August through November 2024. The answer is not to close ourselves off from the world. It is to make public health ordinary: cleaner indoor air, better outbreak communication, easier vaccination, stronger mosquito control and safer workplaces.
Ebola makes the global lesson especially clear. WHO declared the Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern on May 17, 2026. CDC says the risk to the U.S. public remains low, but it has issued guidance for clinicians, laboratories and travelers.
Low risk does not mean no responsibility. Good preparedness helps keep low risks low.
The United States is safer when it works with affected countries and their neighbors, supports WHO coordination, shares data quickly, strengthens laboratories, trains health workers and invests in vaccines, diagnostics and supplies before a crisis reaches our shores. Global health collaboration is not charity; it is prevention and partnership.
California should apply that same principle locally. COVID-19 requires vaccination, ventilation, testing and clear communication. H5N1 requires coordination among public health, agriculture and worker safety. Dengue requires mosquito control and fast response. Hantavirus requires rodent prevention and safe cleaning in cabins and sheds. Ebola requires infection control, contact tracing, safe care, safe burials and community trust.
The goal is not to criticize the work already being done. It is to strengthen it while we have time.
City and county leaders should make infectious-disease drills as normal as earthquake exercises. Neighborhood councils, schools, churches, employers and community clinics can help translate public-health guidance into language people trust. Preparedness should not arrive as a confusing order from above. It should be built through relationships before a crisis. That is especially important in a region where many residents work hourly jobs, care for elders, use public transit or cannot easily stay home without losing income. A preparedness plan that ignores those realities is not a plan; it is a press release.
That means sustained funding for local health departments, modern laboratories, wastewater surveillance, stockpiles, ventilation, vaccine access, farmworker protection and communication systems that earn trust before fear takes over. It also means protecting health-care workers, farm workers, emergency responders, school staff, travelers and families in crowded or under-resourced conditions.
Preparedness is personal, too. Staying current on recommended vaccines, staying home when ill, improving indoor air, reporting mosquito problems, keeping rodents out of homes and vacation cabins, following travel-health guidance and refusing to spread misinformation are forms of stewardship. They are not political gestures. They are basic responsibility.
The next outbreak may arrive through a cough, a mosquito bite, a dairy barn, a rodent-infested cabin, a crowded event, a funeral in a fragile health system or a flight from far away. We cannot predict every pathogen. We can decide whether the next warning meets a prepared public or a divided one.
COVID-19 taught us the cost of delay. Ebola reminds us that global health security is local health security. The lesson is not that California has failed. The lesson is that preparedness must be protected, funded and practiced before the next warning arrives.
(Taiwo Aremu, MD, MPH, PhD, is an assistant professor in the College of Pharmacy at Touro University California. The views expressed are his own.)
