Alexandra Phelan

Last updated

Alexandra Phelan
Education Monash University (BS, LLB)
Australian National University (LLM)
Georgetown University (SJD)
Scientific career
Fields International law, Human rights, Health security, Climate change
Institutions Georgetown University (2014–2023)
Johns Hopkins University (2023–present)
Doctoral advisor Larry Gostin
Website Faculty website

Alexandra Louise Phelan is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. She specializes in international legal and policy issues that are related to emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, including upstream drivers of disease emergence like climate change.

Contents

Education and early career

Phelan attended Eltham College before attending Monash University in Melbourne, Australia where she received her Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Sciences in 2006 and her Bachelor of Laws degree in 2009, focusing on human rights and health security. [1] There, she published an honors thesis entitled Implementing Australia's health security legislation: international obligations, validity and human rights, which examined Australia's implementation of the 2005 International Health Regulations . [2]

For her graduate work, Phelan attended The Australian National University, where she received her Master of Laws degree in 2013, specializing in international law and global health security. [3] During that time, she also worked as a solicitor at King & Wood Mallesons and was admitted to practice in 2010 to the Supreme Court of Victoria and High Court of Australia. In 2013, she moved to the United States to attend Georgetown University Law Center, where she completed her Doctorate of Law (S.J.D.) degree in 2019 under the mentorship of legal scholar Lawrence O. Gostin. Her doctoral work investigated how international law can facilitate response to and prevention of infectious diseases.

Research and career

Phelan joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University as a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. [4] There, she continues her research on international legal and policy issues surrounding infectious diseases around the world, which have included Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19, and Planetary health issues. Her research also factors in concerns around human rights and the Right to health in approaches to deal with infectious disease prevention, preparedness, and response. For example, she was critical of a rule proposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2016 that would expand its powers to screen, test, and quarantine people traveling in the United States during a disease outbreak without procedural protections. [5] Instead, she proposed adding in basic due process steps to ensure the proper checks and balances that would respect civil liberties.

She currently serves on the National Academy of Sciences Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases, which is currently advising the government on the rapidly developing science and policy issues around the COVID-19 pandemic. [6] She is also a consultant for the World Health Organization and the World Bank Group and was formerly a consultant for GAVI. [7]

Prior to Johns Hopkins University, Phelan was a member of faculty at Georgetown University as part of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University School of Medicine, as an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, and as an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Work on the Ebola epidemic

Phelan was involved with the public health response that took place during the Western African Ebola virus epidemic, as well as with subsequent outbreaks of Ebola in Africa, consulting for both the World Health Organization and affected countries. [8] During the initial outbreak, she co-authored a recommendation to the United Nations, advocating for the need for a Security Council Resolution to ensure peace and security in light of the epidemic, noting the disease could exacerbate political unrest in affected countries. [9] She later authored a legal analysis of the United States response to the epidemic, offering legal solutions to gaps in pandemic preparedness. [10] In February 2019, she and her colleagues called for the WHO to declare the epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in order to galvanize the international community to provide political, financial, and technical support to prevent the disease from spreading further. [11] [12] The WHO ultimately made the declaration in July 2019, several months after the initial call to action. [13]

Work on COVID-19

Phelan has been monitoring the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic since the disease began to emerge in Wuhan in late 2019. In late January 2020, she advocated that the WHO should declare the novel coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) as a signal to the international community to launch a coordinated public health response. [14] [15]

Phelan has also been critical of reports that Chinese officials cordon sanitaire in the Hubei Province, forcing the quarantine of those in the region. [14] [16] She notes that the Liberian government's forced quarantine of 60 to 120 thousand people in West Point, Monrovia during the 2014 Ebola outbreak led to violence and public mistrust that exacerbated the spread of the virus. [15] The lockdown may have also limited access to medical supplies and overburdened hospitals during a critical time, so Phelan has also advocated for an investigation into the impact of the forced lockdown. [17] Phelan has asserted that cultivating public trust, while also preserving human rights, is essential for combatting the growing crisis. She also cautioned the United States against initiating a travel ban on people from countries affected by the novel coronavirus, as bans can break international trust. [18]

As the crisis has grown, Phelan and her colleagues have developed a set of recommendations for ensuring COVID-19 control measures are both equitable and inclusive to respect the needs of vulnerable populations, both in terms of increasing access to testing and treatment, as well as access to reliable and timely information. [19] They argue that failure to take such an approach will undermine response efforts to the pandemic, eroding trust among these marginalized communities and frontline healthcare workers.

Key publications

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

<i>Cordon sanitaire</i> (medicine) Quarantine of a geographic area

A cordon sanitaire is the restriction of movement of people into or out of a defined geographic area, such as a community, region, or country. The term originally denoted a barrier used to stop the spread of infectious diseases. The term is also often used metaphorically, in English, to refer to attempts to prevent the spread of an ideology deemed unwanted or dangerous, such as the containment policy adopted by George F. Kennan against the Soviet Union.

David L. Heymann is an American infectious disease epidemiologist and public health expert, based in London.

The International Health Regulations (IHR), first adopted by the World Health Assembly in 1969 and last revised in 2005, are a legally binding rules that only apply to the WHO that is an instrument that aims for international collaboration "to prevent, protect against, control, and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks and that avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade". The IHR is the only international legal treaty with the responsibility of empowering the World Health Organization (WHO) to act as the main global surveillance system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luciana Borio</span> Brazilian-American physician and public health administrator

Luciana Borio is a Brazilian-American infectious disease physician and public health administrator. She is a vice president at In-Q-Tel. She previously served as director for Medical and Biodefense Preparedness at the National Security Council, acting chief scientist of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), assistant commissioner for counterterrorism policy of the FDA, and director of FDA's Office of Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats. She is known for her work advancing clinical trials, the development of medical countermeasures for health emergencies, and the public health responses to Ebola and Zika outbreaks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public health emergency of international concern</span> Formal declaration by the World Health Organization

A public health emergency of international concern is a formal declaration by the World Health Organization (WHO) of "an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response", formulated when a situation arises that is "serious, sudden, unusual, or unexpected", which "carries implications for public health beyond the affected state's national border" and "may require immediate international action". Under the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR), states have a legal duty to respond promptly to a PHEIC. The declaration is publicized by an IHR Emergency Committee (EC) of international experts, which was developed following the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak.

Dr. Daniel R. Lucey is an American physician, researcher, clinical professor of medicine of infectious diseases at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and a research associate in anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where he has co-organised an exhibition on eight viral outbreaks.

Jennifer Nuzzo is an American epidemiologist. She is Director of the Pandemic Center and Professor of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health, having previously taught at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is also a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neil Ferguson (epidemiologist)</span> British epidemiologist and researcher

Neil Morris Ferguson is a British epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology, who specialises in the patterns of spread of infectious disease in humans and animals. He is the director of the Jameel Institute, and of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, and head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Vice-Dean for Academic Development in the Faculty of Medicine, all at Imperial College London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Syra Madad</span> American pathogen preparedness expert

Syra Madad is an American pathogen preparedness expert and infectious disease epidemiologist. Madad is the Senior Director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals where she is part of the executive leadership team which oversees New York City's response to the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the city's 11 public hospitals. She was featured in the Netflix documentary series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak and the Discovery Channel documentary The Vaccine: Conquering COVID.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael J. Ryan (doctor)</span> Irish doctor and Chief Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme

Michael Joseph Ryan is an Irish epidemiologist and former trauma surgeon, specialising in infectious disease and public health. He is executive director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, leading the team responsible for the international containment and treatment of COVID-19. Ryan has held leadership positions and has worked on various outbreak response teams in the field to eradicate the spread of diseases including bacillary dysentery, cholera, Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Marburg virus disease, measles, meningitis, relapsing fever, Rift Valley fever, SARS, and Shigellosis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nahid Bhadelia</span> Indian-American infectious diseases physician and researcher

Nahid Bhadelia is an American infectious-diseases physician, founding director of Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research (CEID) at Boston University and an associate professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. She served as the Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response on the White House COVID-19 Response Team.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caitlin Rivers</span> American epidemiologist

Caitlin M. Rivers is an American epidemiologist who as Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, specializing on improving epidemic preparedness. Rivers is currently working on the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on the incorporation of infectious disease modeling and forecasting into public health decision making.

Maimuna (Maia) Majumder is a computational epidemiologist and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital's Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP). She is currently working on modeling the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebecca Katz</span> Global Health Professor

Rebecca Katz is a professor and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center. She is an expert in global health and international diplomacy, specializing in emerging infectious diseases. From 2004 to 2019, she was a consultant for the United States Department of State on matters related to the Biological Weapons Convention and emerging infectious disease threats. Katz served on the Joe Biden presidential campaign's public health panel to advise on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Planning and preparing for pandemics has happened in countries and international organizations. The World Health Organization writes recommendations and guidelines, though there is no sustained mechanism to review countries' preparedness for epidemics and their rapid response abilities. National action depends on national governments. In 2005–2006, before the 2009 swine flu pandemic and during the decade following it, the governments in the United States, France, UK, and others managed strategic health equipment stocks, but they often reduced stocks after the 2009 pandemic in order to reduce costs.

The Central Epidemic Command Center is an agency of the National Health Command Center (NHCC). It has been activated by the government of Taiwan for several disease outbreaks, such as the 2009 swine flu pandemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. The head of the agency is Chen Shih-chung, the minister of health and welfare. The CECC is associated with the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Daszak</span> British zoologist

Peter Daszak is a British zoologist, consultant and public expert on disease ecology, in particular on zoonosis. He is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health and pandemic prevention. He is also a member of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He lives in Suffern, New York.

Crystal Watson is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. She is an expert in health security, biodefense, and risk assessment and preparedness for emerging infectious diseases. She is currently working on the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sylvie Champaloux Briand is a French physician who is Director of the Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases Department at the World Health Organization. Briand led the Global Influenza Programme during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Briand launched the WHO Information Network for Epidemics which looked to counter the spread of COVID-19 misinformation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saskia Popescu</span> Infectious disease epidemiologist

Saskia Popescu is an infectious disease epidemiologist and global health security expert in Phoenix, Arizona. She is an Assistant Professor of epidemiology at the University of Maryland, and holds academic appointments at the University of Arizona and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, where she lectures on biopreparedness and outbreak response. Since the start of the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, Popescu has worked to prepare for and mitigate the spread of the disease within healthcare and the entertainment industry, where she led the global epidemiology and infection prevention response for Netflix. She has been recognized for her communication efforts around the pandemic, as well as her work on the front lines in infection prevention and healthcare biopreparedness. Popescu currently is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks, addressing converging biological risks from biological weapons nonproliferation, biosecurity, emerging infectious diseases and ecological security, biopreparedness in private industry, and global health security vulnerabilities.

References

  1. ↑ Bailey, Megan (5 March 2013). "Human rights on agenda". Herald Sun. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  2. ↑ Phelan, Alexandra Louise (2009). Implementing Australia's health security legislation : international obligations, validity and human rights (Thesis thesis).
  3. ↑ Andrianatos, Veronica (17 August 2018). "Using International Law to prevent Ebola and Zika outbreaks". ANU College of Law. Retrieved 4 April 2020.
  4. ↑ "Alexandra L. Phelan | Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security". centerforhealthsecurity.org. Retrieved 26 February 2024.
  5. ↑ Yong, Ed (30 December 2016). "The CDC's New Quarantine Rule Could Violate Civil Liberties". The Atlantic. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  6. ↑ "Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats". www.nationalacademies.org. Retrieved 4 April 2020.
  7. ↑ "WHO | Update and summary guide to the report: Advancing the Right to Health – The Vital Role of Law". WHO. Archived from the original on 6 December 2018. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  8. ↑ Segal, Jillian; Landsberg, Judith (24 August 2016). "The Grattan Institute is wrong. We need more science students, not fewer". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  9. ↑ King, Tim (18 September 2014). "O'Neill Institute Statement on the United Nations Security Council Resolution on the Ebola Outbreak". oneill.law.georgetown.edu. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  10. ↑ "The Ebola Sentinel: a legal analysis of US pandemic preparedness". Ebola's message : public health and medicine in the twenty-first century. Evans, Nicholas G., 1985-, Smith, Tara C., 1976-, Majumder, Maimuna S. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2016. pp. 111–126. ISBN   978-0-262-33619-2. OCLC   960448151.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  11. ↑ Gostin, Lawrence; Phelan, Alexandra; Coutinho, Alex Godwin; Eccleston-Turner, Mark; Erondu, Ngozi; Filani, Oyebanji; Inglesby, Tom; Katz, Rebecca; Maleche, Allan; Nuzzo, Jennifer B.; Tomori, Oyewale (16 February 2019). "Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: time to sound a global alert?". The Lancet. 393 (10172): 617–620. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(19)30243-0 . ISSN   0140-6736. PMID   30732850.
  12. ↑ Gulland, Anne (26 June 2019). "Long-running Ebola outbreak is now an international health emergency, say experts". The Telegraph. ISSN   0307-1235 . Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  13. ↑ "WHO declares Ebola outbreak in Congo a global health emergency". www.cbsnews.com. 18 July 2019. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  14. 1 2 Cohen, Jon (22 January 2020). "WHO panel puts off decision on whether to sound alarm on rapid spread of new virus". Science | AAAS. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  15. 1 2 Phelan, Alexandra L.; Katz, Rebecca; Gostin, Lawrence O. (25 February 2020). "The Novel Coronavirus Originating in Wuhan, China: Challenges for Global Health Governance". JAMA. 323 (8): 709–710. doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.1097 . ISSN   0098-7484. PMID   31999307.
  16. ↑ Fifield, Anna; Hawkins, Derek; Taylor, Adam; Wan, William (18 February 2020). "Director of Wuhan hospital dies of coronavirus as death toll passes 2,000 in China". Washington Post. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  17. ↑ Rauhala, Emily; Wan, William; Shih, Gerry (11 March 2020). "First, China. Then, Italy. What the U.S. can learn from extreme coronavirus lockdowns". Washington Post. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  18. ↑ Yong, Ed (3 February 2020). "The New Coronavirus Is a Truly Modern Epidemic". The Atlantic. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  19. ↑ "COVID-19: Scientists urge 'equitable and inclusive' response". www.medicalnewstoday.com. 23 March 2020. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  20. ↑ "2019 Women of Influence are champions of reinvention". Australian Financial Review. 9 September 2019. Retrieved 4 April 2020.
  21. ↑ "UPMC Center for Health Security Announces 2015 Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity". www.prnewswire.com (Press release). Retrieved 4 April 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.