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White House Releases Global Health Security Strategy

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The United States has released its first Global Health Security Strategy aimed to protect America and its partners from infectious disease threats, White House Spokesperson Sarah Sanders said in a press release.
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"Today, the Trump Administration is releasing its Global Health Security Strategy, the first full-fledged strategy of its kind. The Strategy defines the actions the Administration will take to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate", Sanders said on Thursday.

The Trump administration said it will use bilateral, regional, and multilateral engagements to encourage countries to make health security a national priority.

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The Pentagon in a separate release said the new strategy along with the national biodefence strategy will help guide the federal government in protecting the United States from outside threats.

In 2018, US President Donald Trump signed a new National Biodefence Strategy to address threats from state and non-state actors. Trump has said that the strategy creates a cabinet-level steering committee to protect Americans from bioterrorism and natural outbreaks of deadly diseases.

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The strategy also directs the US national security advisor to review biological threats and prioritize biodefence actions annually in order to enable the federal government to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to such incidents.

The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced last week, that the United States is in the midst of its worst measles outbreak in a quarter century, with 704 individual cases since the beginning of the year.

The agency pointed out that it is the highest number of measles cases in the United States since 1994. The CDC declared the highly infectious disease eliminated in 2000.

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