TITLE
title
DHHS-PUBLIC HEALTH DIVISION: WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANT GONORRHEA CONTRACT ($327,834)
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SPONSOR
sponsor
Anita Ramachandran
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BACKGROUND
background
The Guilford County Department of Health & Human Services - Public Health Division (PH) has established a health trends research contract with Wake Forest University (WFU) Health Sciences with funding support from the North Carolina Department of Health & Human Services - Epidemiology/Communicable Disease Branch. WFU and the PH team are working together on surveillance and research of drug-resistant gonorrhea with WFU helping to: enhance the PH lab's capacity, jointly pilot new methods for gonorrhea resistance testing, and collaboratively develop novel strategies for rapid response to antimicrobial-resistant gonorrhea.
Guilford County has been participating in the SURRG (Strengthening the U.S. Response to Resistant Gonorrhea) program since its inception in 2017. Recently CDC ended the SURRG project and replaced it with CARGOS (Combating Antimicrobial Resistant Gonorrhea and Other STIs) program. In doing so, CDC expanded the program from seven sites to 20 sites across the U.S. The scope of work was modified across all the sites to focus on specific specimen types.
Key components of the CARGOS project include:
1. Strengthen epidemiology capacity to detect, monitor, and respond to antibiotic resistance (AR) in STI’s.
2. Improve coordination of antimicrobial resistance in STI preparedness and outbreak response activities.
3. Enhance local laboratory testing for surveillance, reporting and response.
4. Enhance coordination between epi-lab-health information technology.
The CARGOS program is just one project of a much larger project that CDC awards to NC DDHS Public Health. NC DHHS contracts with Guilford County to ensure that locally a core team of staff is available to meet all the CARGOS strategies, as outlined by CDC. The County does this by sub-contracting Wa...
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