NEW YORK — Health officials are celebrating some important victories in 2014, and Time magazine even named Ebola fighters the persons of the year. Nevertheless, this was a black-eye year for public health.
Some vital vaccines did not work well. Federal laboratories were careless with dangerous pathogens. And international health officials failed to stop a West Africa outbreak from exploding into the worst Ebola epidemic ever.
Such failings occurred during one of the busiest 12 months of contagions in at least a decade. In the United States, infectious disease menaces seemingly whizzed at us from every direction, from Ebola and enterovirus to measles and MERS. Mumps plagued Ohio. California saw its worst whooping cough outbreak in 70 years. And a mosquito-borne disease called chikungunya burned through the Caribbean and took root in the United States.
The last time U.S. health officials were this frantic was 2009, when a flu pandemic swept the globe. “But that was one disease,” while 2014 had more of a variety of fires to put out, said Dr. Marci Layton of New York City’s health department.