To aid others, New York’s health department started posting its weekly global health data report
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Amid delays by the federal government to release public health data like counts on avian influenza cases, state governments are continuing to build up their own public health reporting tools, including a new global report developed by the New York State Department of Health.
Many states have launched or expanded their public health data portals in recent years, and among them is New York, where state State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald this month said it’s critical that health professionals and communities have access to “timely, high-quality” data.
“Public health data are vital to helping states and localities understand the burden and impact of emerging infections so we can make informed decisions about prevention strategies,” McDonald said in a statement accompanying an announcement of the new weekly report published by his department.
Since January, New York’s health agency has each Friday begun publishing its “global health update report,” a curated summary of data on infectious diseases aggregated from more than 30 sources. The reports contain trend data related to ongoing and emerging public health trends, like Africa’s continuing mpox outbreak, which the World Health Organization elevated to a “public health emergency of international concern” last August, and cases of the avian influenza that have been detected in livestock and some humans in the United States.
The avian influenza has concerned some epidemiologists, who say the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form more dangerous to humans if permitted to continue circulating in populations of cows and chickens. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently ranks the virus’s risk to public health as “low,” but it has meanwhile contributed to the cost of eggs more than tripling since last fall.
Eli Rosenberg, a deputy director of science with the New York health department’s Office of Public Health and Office of Technology, said the state’s reports are pertinent not only to inform the department’s policymakers, but globally.
“New York is a strategically important location in the United States, in terms of global travel, big population center, diverse population center,” said Rosenberg, who holds a doctorate in epidemiology. “So that is part of why we do this work around assessing the global health threats because many big and important things in this country, they emerge in New York.”
New York’s weekly health report is compiled by Ethan Mitchell, a program research scientist who combs dozens of primary sources, like county, state and federal health agency websites, and datasets published by groups like the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and various national centers for disease control, like World Health Organization regional offices.
Mitchell collects all the information manually, as opposed to using APIs or other automation technologies, because the myriad datasets he gathers wouldn’t match up properly, and because the reports aren’t just raw data, but a curation of the information deemed most relevant to policymakers who don’t have time to sift through huge spreadsheets.
“We’ve actually done this report internally for a number of years now. It was primarily for organizational leadership awareness of things that are going on,” Mitchell said. “There was value seen in what we were doing internally and it was shared with some other folks at other health departments and they seemed to see the value as well, too, so we made the decision to start posting it publicly for the sake of transparency.”
New York isn’t alone in publishing health data, though as a purveyor of global health information it may be unique among states.
A spokesperson from the Ohio Department of Health told StateScoop that the state has beefed up its public health dashboards in recent years, with its summary of infectious disease portal being its most extensive source of public health information. Ohio also maintains a dashboard for monitoring wastewater in the state, which the spokesperson said began during the COVID-19 pandemic when public officials sought new means of tracking the virus. Ohio’s wastewater dashboard now also includes information on influenza and respiratory syncytial virus.
State health reports like New York’s and Ohio’s could become more relevant under the administration of President Donald Trump, who appointed prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. Kennedy, who helped advance conspiracy theories like the baseless plot in which the COVID-19 vaccine contains a 5G-enabled tracking chip, has already in some cases flouted science-informed policy in his department. A measles outbreak grows in Texas amid a Kennedy order to indefinitely postpone vaccine advisory meetings.
In New York, Rosenberg said it is the expertise of a network of public health experts and trained scientists that enable critical information and analysis sharing to occur, for the furtherance of public health.
“There’s robustness there because we’re looking so broadly,” he said. “We’re in conversation with other jurisdictions all the time, directly. And that feeds not just the global health report, but just in general we have a lot of collaborations across the country and across the world that are sort of informing us about what’s going on.”