Responding to a question about the incoming Trump Administration’s commitment to global health priorities, officials from key U.S. government agencies involved in outbreak response and international research collaborations expressed optimism Thursday at #TropMed24 that there will continue to be bipartisan support for the work they do.

“I don’t think anyone wants pathogens moving across borders,” said Kayla Laserson, director of the Global Health Center at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Stopping these health threats at their source through global health work is essential – and I think bipartisan.”

Laserson’s remarks came in the context of a panel discussing U.S. interagency global health collaborations that also featured officials from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Advanced Research and Projects Agency for Health (ARPANET-H), the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI). 

Nelson Michael, director of WRAIR’s Center for Infectious Disease Research, noted that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) long ago recognized that the global impact of infectious diseases is a national security threat because the spread of diseases like HIV/AIDS can destabilize entire regions of the world. He said this view has been widely embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike and is unlikely to change with the new administration. 

“I’m not saying we don’t go through turbulent times with any new administration,” Michael said. But if scientists continue to make the case that U.S. investments in global health are in the best interests of the American people, their work will appeal to a broad political coalition, he said. 

Peter Kilmarx, deputy director of the NIH’s Fogarty International Center, said that if you look across the NIH’s broad portfolio of research, it’s clear that international research collaborations are essential for developing treatments for a wide range of afflictions — and not just infectious diseases. He pointed to recent advances in esophageal cancer and Alzheimer’s disease that emerged from global research partnerships supported by NIH. Kilmarx also noted that to develop new treatments for rare diseases, “You need to work internationally” in order find enough patients to conduct a clinical trial. 

Meanwhile, several panelists were particularly excited by an effort last year within the National Security Council to finalize an interagency playbook for outbreak response that they believe will better showcase U.S. global health capabilities. The CDC’s  Laserson said that with this much-improved gameplan for agency roles and responsibilities, the U.S. had “teams on the ground” within 72 hours during this year’s mpox outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and also with the September Marburg outbreak in Uganda. 

David Fitter, director of CDC’s Division of Global Migration Health, said it is particularly important to have well-defined roles and goals for interagency cooperation “when resources are more constrained.”