Your view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should expand, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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You probably heard a lot about the CDC, short for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during the pandemic, likely more than you wanted to know. Mandy Cohen, the center’s director, came to Johns Hopkins recently to talk about the role of the agency in protecting the public’s health.

Cohen: We know how hard it is to protect the health and improve lives of this country which is the mission of CDC. We're integrating with the health delivery system and continuing to be the response agency that the country needs, so we're really focused on three major things. We're focused on being ready to respond to any health threats, that could be a virus like avian flu, it could be the extreme heat which we know impacts our health, it could be overdoses or suicides where we lose hundreds of thousands of folks.  :30

Other primary roles for the CDC include gathering data for all kinds of things, like where cows may be infected with the bird flu, analyzing and disseminating it, and providing information to policymakers and the public on health issues. Cohen invites people to look at the CDC website for more. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.