The University of Alabama at Birmingham has been awarded $2 million by the Alabama Department of Public Health in support of establishing the Alabama Regional Center for Infection Prevention and Control.
The Alabama Regional Center for Infection Prevention and control will bring together experts from the university and across the state to assist the ADPH Infectious Disease and Outbreaks Division in addressing infectious diseases. Key to the center’s mission is to provide training and technical assistance across Alabama’s public health systems to increase the workforce’s skills in detecting, responding to, controlling and preventing outbreaks.
“As a nation and state, we were really caught flat-footed by SARS-CoV-2 even though scientists had been warning that coronaviruses had the potential to create a global pandemic,” said Suzanne Judd, professor and co-director of the ARC IPC and director of the Lister Hill Center for Health Policy in the UAB School of Public Health. “Working together with the ADPH will help us to be ready when a new virus or bacteria threatens the health of Alabamians. We will be better prepared to communicate risks to the public to help prevent future pandemics.”
The coronavirus pandemic has had immense results on the state, with more than 548,000 COVID-19 cases and 11,250 deaths due to the virus in Alabama, as of June 2021.