Governor creates new agency to help deal with disasters.
An excerpt.
A dose of prevention
Governor signs bill for a Public Health Department to aid disaster readiness.
By Clea Benson - Bee Capitol BureauPublished 12:00 am PDT Friday, September 15, 2006
Days after the state auditor reported that California might not be prepared for a large-scale disease outbreak or a bioterrorist attack, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday signed a bill establishing a separate state Public Health Department.
The new department will help local governments respond to medical catastrophes and epidemics. For decades, those functions have been handled by the same department that runs the state's Medi-Cal health system for the poor.
Gov. Ronald Reagan consolidated the two operations in 1971. But critics now say the state's public health operations need to be run separately to ensure they get the focus they deserve.
In a report released Tuesday, the state auditor said California had not adequately tested whether medical and health systems were prepared for events such as a bioterrorist attack. The audit also found the state was too slow to spend federal homeland security funds.
"Without adequate testing, California cannot be certain that its medical and health systems can respond to all emergencies," the report said.
State Sen. Deborah Ortiz, who wrote Senate Bill 162 establishing the new Department of Public Health, said the auditor's report was just one in a long series of studies showing California needed to improve its statewide public health efforts.
"California is woefully ill-prepared for not only bioterrorism and pandemic flu and West Nile virus, but lacks the basic capacity to even handle chronic disease," said Ortiz, a Democrat from Sacramento. "The (auditor's) report just simply drove home again all the studies that show we need a new model."Schwarzenegger acknowledged during a signing ceremony in Los Angeles that the state needed to improve its security spending and emergency preparedness. But he said
