NEW YORK (AP) — No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.

In the midst of a strange outbreak ofhantavirus on a cruise shipthat involves Americans andis making headlines around the world, the U.S. government’s top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has beenmissing in action, according to a number of experts.

“We seem to have things under very good control,” President Donald Trump told reporters Friday evening.

But experts saythe situationhas not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.

“The CDC is not even a player,” said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I’ve never seen that before.”

The CDC’s diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.

The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man’s wife and a German woman, who both died.

Hantavirus wasfirst identifiedas a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.

For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what they should know and how they should worry.

Source: Drudge Report