Idaho will leverage awarded funds from CDC-RFA-CK-24-0002 to deploy resources for hosting state-led training and will allow state-level staff to address pressing public health infectious disease threats and events. Specific activities include: Maintaining core surveillance staff, processes, and systems, including funding support to local-level programs to ensure case investigation data management and provision to the state; support new advanced molecular detection instrumentation and method development; ensure surge capacity in the event of emerging infectious disease issues; support an enteric/foodborne epidemiologist in addition to four (4) state-level disease investigators to implement model practices, design and deploy performance metrics, serve as a deployable resource to local jurisdictions in need, and better commit to understanding the burden of enteric, foodborne, waterborne, and zoonotic diseases in the state; maintain voluntarily reporting the detection of infections resulting from contact with healthcare environments and educate healthcare facilities and the local public health staff on prevention of healthcare associated infections, request voluntary submission of targeted MDRO samples to the state laboratory, and promote antimicrobial stewardship; rapidly detect and characterize antimicrobial resistance in pathogens by testing isolates submitted by participating in the antimicrobial resistance laboratory network; maintain a robust seasonal influenza surveillance system to detect and measure the impact of the virus and combining the influenza surveillance with monitoring, detection, and response to other respiratory pathogens such as RSV and COVID-19, increase geographic representation of virologic surveillance work toward the improvement of timeliness, completeness, and transparency of vaccine preventable diseases; sustain robust arboviral surveillance efforts across the state, identify seasonally introduced exotic Aedes populatio
ns, monitor for bacterial vector-borne infections, and thoroughly investigate risk factors, maintain seasonal arboviral surveillance efforts locally, through much-needed contractual agreements with mosquito abatement districts, maintain epidemiologic, ecologic surveillance, and laboratory capacity to detect routine, rare, and emergent vector-borne pathogens in Idaho; and hire an entomology contractor to conduct some targeted tick drags in ecosystems that would be considered appropriate for the tick species; and support building workforce capacity for clinical mycology.
