
Jennifer Nuzzo, DrPH
Biography
Jennifer Nuzzo is a nationally and globally recognized leader on global health security, public health preparedness and response, and health systems resilience. Together with colleagues from the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Economist Impact, she co-leads the development of the first-ever Global Health Security Index, which benchmarks 195 countries’ public health and healthcare capacities and capabilities, their commitment to international norms and global health security financing, and socioeconomic, political, and environmental risk environments.
In addition to her scholarly work, Nuzzo regularly advises national governments and for-profit and nonprofit organizations on pandemic preparedness and response, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a pandemic advisor for Impact Assets’ Stop the Spread Campaign. She is currently a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s (NASEM) Standing Committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Center for Preparedness and Response.
Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Fox News, Politico, The Hill, and The Boston Globe. She was featured in Debunking Borat, a television series on Amazon Prime Video, and her work was featured on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She served as COVID Advisor for the Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
Recent News
The moment everything changed
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COVID is still evolving and will find new ways to evade immune systems, scientists say
But that was one of the first big surprises from the virus dubbed SARS-CoV-2. It evolved like crazy.
"SARS-CoV-2 so far has probably been even faster than influenza virus, which is really remarkable," says Jesse Bloom, who studies viral evolution at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle. "I thought it would undergo some evolution, but the speed at which it's undergone that evolution and the ability it's shown to undergo these big evolutionary jumps is really remarkable."
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Brown experts discuss: What did the world learn from the COVID-19 pandemic?
Jennifer Nuzzo in the News
See all Pandemic Center newsPandemic Center director offers advice for future pandemic preparedness
President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 opened the event and Nuzzo was introduced by Francesca Beaudoin PhD’16, the academic dean of the School of Public Health.
Nuzzo, who is also a professor of epidemiology, opened her lecture by recognizing the devastating “failures” of the American health care system after nationwide shutdowns left cities, such as New York City, desolate.
“I don’t want to imply that New York was wrong to (shutdown),” Nuzzo told The Herald in an interview after the event. “The fact that it had to come to that was a failure.”
Health ARE WE READY FOR THE NEXT PANDEMIC?
Undoubtedly, America’s health achievements have changed world history in terms of the lives saved. Victories against polio and yellow fever, HIV-AIDS and malaria, infant mortality and TB are often taken for granted, along with the virtual eradication of smallpox. But all this may soon change dramatically, if Trump follows through on his disastrous choices for top government healthcare appointments.
According to an analysis by Canadian health and science writer, Crawford Kilian, the breakdown in America’s public health system is just getting started – The Tyee December 20, 2024. Future health care spending at home and abroad is slated for drastic cuts, says Killian, and “Trump’s impending return seems likely to collapse American health science with consequences as disastrous for the rest of the world, as for the 346 million Americans.”
Defense against dangerous epidemic outbreaks requires constant vigilance, and public support for public health safety measures, like vaccinations. No one can afford a repeat of Covid-19, the worst global pandemic in a century, which ended up costing the lives of over 1.2 M. Americans. Our speakers include Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, infectious disease specialist and global health physician, who advises the W.H.O on emerging diseases and Crawford Kilian, science and health reporter, who has blogged about H5N1 avian flu and other potential hazards to global health since 2005. Our discussion will address the looming public health crisis and discuss the best ways forward.
Also joining the Forum is Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and a nationally and globally recognized leader on global health security, public health preparedness and response, and health systems resilience.
In addition, Nuzzo regularly advises national governments and for-profit and non-profit organizations on pandemic preparedness and response, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a pandemic advisor for Impact Assets’ Stop the Spread Campaign and a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s (NASEM) Standing Committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Center for Preparedness and Response. Her articles have appeared in NYT, The Washington Post, USA Today, Politico, The Hill, and The Boston Globe.
Audio from this event presented at the link provided
US Urged To Do More To Fight Bird Flu After First Death
The first human death from bird flu in the United States has intensified calls for the government to ramp up efforts to stave off the threat of another pandemic -- particularly ahead of Donald Trump's return to the White House.
Health experts around the world have for months been urging US authorities to increase surveillance and share more information about its bird flu outbreak after the virus started spreading among dairy cows for the first time.
On Monday, Louisiana health authorities reported that a patient aged over 60 was the country's first person to die from bird flu.
The patient, who contracted avian influenza after being exposed to infected birds, had underlying medical conditions, US health authorities said.
The World Health Organization has maintained that bird flu's risk to the general population is low, and there is no evidence that it has been transmitted between people.
However health experts have been sounding the alarm about the potential pandemic threat of bird flu, particularly as it has shown signs of mutating in mammals into a form that could spread more easily among humans.
The avian influenza variant H5N1 was first detected in 1996, but a record global outbreak since 2020 has resulted in hundreds of millions of poultry birds being culled -- and killed an unknown but massive number of wild birds.
In March, the virus started transmitting between dairy cows in the United States.
Since the start of last year, 66 bird flu cases have been recorded in humans in the United States, many of them among farm workers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The US cases had been relatively mild until the Louisiana patient, though a Canadian teenager become severely ill. Nearly half of the 954 human cases of H5N1 recorded since 2003 have been fatal, according to the WHO.
Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, emphasised that the public should not be unduly worried about another pandemic.
"The problem is that this is how it could start," she added.
Koopmans criticised that "there is not really an effort to contain" the bird flu outbreak among cattle in the United States.
Tom Peacock, a virologist at the Imperial College London, said he thought "the biggest error the US has made is its slow and weak response to the cattle outbreak".
The reason bird flu was affecting US cattle seemed to be a combination of this weak early response, poor biosecurity, "and the intensification of US dairy farming (which involves far more movement of animals than any European system)," he told AFP.
Peacock was a co-author of a preprint study released on Monday, which has not been peer-reviewed, describing how the mutations of H5N1 in cattle enhance its ability to infect other mammals -- including humans.
Rebecca Christofferson, a scientist at Louisiana State University, said there were signs that the deceased patient's virus mutated while they were infected -- but it was not transmitted to anyone else.
"The worry is, the more you let this sort of run wild... the more chances you have for this sort of mutation to not only occur, but to then get out and infect someone else, then you start a chain reaction," she told AFP.
WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said the United States "are doing a lot of surveillance" on bird flu. "That's why we're hearing about it," she added.
Last week, the US government awarded an additional $306 million to bolster H5N1 surveillance programs and research.
Peacock said that monitoring has increased for US cattle but warned "big gaps" remain.
Rick Bright, a former top US health official, has been among those calling for the department of agriculture to release more information about bird flu infections among animals.
"There are still just reams of data from this current administration that haven't been released," he told the Washington Post on Monday.
The United States has a stockpile of millions of H5N1 vaccine doses, which Bright said should be offered to at-risk people such as farm workers.
The Biden government has also been urged to encourage companies to develop rapid home tests as well as monitor wastewater for bird flu.
Several of the experts called on Biden to act quickly, before president-elect Trump replaces him in less than two weeks.
There are particular concerns about Trump's pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy is a sceptic of vaccines, which would be among the most powerful weapons to fend off a potential new pandemic. He is also a known fan of raw milk, which has repeatedly been found to be contaminated with bird flu from infected dairy cows.
People at home have been advised to avoid infected animals -- and raw milk -- and to get a seasonal flu vaccine.
Christofferson said her "biggest worry" was that if someone was infected with both seasonal flu and H5N1, they could mix to become "something that's either more transmissible and or more dangerous to people".
The Barron's news department was not involved in the creation of the content above. This article was produced by AFP. For more information go to AFP.com.
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