One in three local health departments lost at least one epidemiologist last year, and fewer than half managed to fill the job, according to a national survey released Tuesday.
The survey, run by a public health research center at a university in North Carolina, reached about 1,200 county and city health departments. Smaller departments were hit hardest. Among those serving fewer than 50,000 people, about 40 percent now have no epidemiologist on staff at all, up from 29 percent four years ago.
Epidemiologists are the people who track disease: they spot clusters of food poisoning, count flu cases, and figure out where an outbreak started. In a small department, one person may cover all of it.
Why they leave
Departments that lost staff cited pay first. The median salary for a local epidemiologist in the survey was about $68,000, well below what the same skills command at hospitals, insurers and tech companies. Short-term federal grants that paid for many positions have also ended, the survey found.
«We trained a generation of people during the pandemic, and then we told them the money was running out,» said Dr. Nolan Pryce, who led the survey. «They listened.»
What it means
The report’s authors say gaps in staffing can slow outbreak response, though the survey cannot measure that directly. Several health officers interviewed for the report described sharing one epidemiologist across three or four counties.
In western Kansas, one health officer said her department now sends lab results to a neighboring county for analysis. «It works,» she said. «Until two outbreaks happen in the same week.»