Acute Response

Key Faculty : Ronald Hershow, MD

Dr. Ronald Hershow’s research interests include infectious diseases, specifically HIV infection, nosocomial infections, viral hepatitis, and bioterrorism. His teaching interest is in infectious disease epidemiology.

Selected Publications

Hershow RC, O’Driscoll PT, Handelsman E, et al. HCV coinfection and HIV RNA levels, CD4 percent decline, and clinical progression to AIDS or death among HIV-infected women in the Women and Infants Transmission Study. Clinical Infectious Diseases. 2005;40:859-867;

Charurat M, Blattner W, Hershow R, Buck A, Zorilla CD, Watts DH, Paul M, Landesman S, Adeniyi-Jones S, Tuomala R. Changing trends in clinical AIDS presentations and survival among HIV-1-infected women. J Women's Health. 2004;13: 719-30; Heroin insufflation as a trigger for life-threatening asthma.Chest 2003;123:510-517; and Risk factors for Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpes virus infection among HIV-1-infected pregnant women in the USA.AIDS; 17(3): 425-433, 2003

Description of Acute Response Team

The goals of public health are to maintain health and prevent disease by working proactively. Nevertheless, the ability to react is also paramount: acute response represents much of the practice of public health. When public health crises arise, tools such as rapid assessment and outbreak investigation are an important part of the public health professional s toolkit. The goal of the acute response team is to train a cadre of public health professionals and academics to evaluate needs and institute control measures while at the same time adapting state-of-the-art techniques to uncover and answer the critical scientific questions that are posed by public health crises.