Mission

The mission of the Division of Communicable Disease Control & Prevention (DCDCP) is to work in partnership with the community to promote health and quality of life and to protect the public from the spread of communicable diseases and the health impact of emergencies.

Alameda County Health, Public Health Department has a number of programs and campaigns devoted to the prevention of communicable and sexually transmitted diseases.

Major Division Components

• Surveillance: Collect and analyze data on cases of communicable disease (including but not limited to HIV, STDs, and Hepatitis) and investigate those that pose the highest risk to the public.
• Immunization: Distribute state-supplied vaccines to health care providers, assess immunization status of children, sponsor immunization clinics, and maintain a small computerized registry of immunization records for children from birth to 18 years old.
• Public Health Laboratory: Provide testing, isolation, and identification of harmful microorganisms that may be present in humans, animals, and the environment to aid in the diagnosis and control of communicable diseases.
• Education and Prevention: Provide STD, HIV, and Hepatitis education and counseling to high-risk populations and community agencies, screening of high-risk individuals and making referrals to health care providers for evaluation, treatment, and follow-up when appropriate.
• Public Health Emergency Preparedness: Coordinate with health care and emergency medical service providers on preventing, detecting, quickly responding to, and recovering from any type of emergency that impacts health, particularly those emergencies whose scale, timing, or unpredictability threatens to overwhelm routine capabilities.

About Communicable Disease

What is a communicable disease?

A communicable disease is one that is spread from one person to another through various means, including contact with blood and bodily fluids, breathing in an airborne virus, or being bitten by an insect.

Reporting of cases of communicable disease is important in the planning and evaluation of disease prevention and control programs, in the assurance of appropriate medical therapy, and in the detection of common-source outbreaks. California law mandates healthcare providers and laboratories to report over 80 diseases or conditions to their local health department. Some examples of reportable communicable diseases include Hepatitis A, B & C, influenza, measles, and salmonella and other food-borne illnesses. Reportable Diseases in California

How do these communicable diseases spread?

How these diseases spread depends on the specific disease or infectious agent. Some ways in which communicable diseases spread are:

1. Physical contact with an infected person, such as touch (staphylococcus), sexual intercourse (gonorrhea, HIV), fecal/oral transmission (hepatitis A), or droplets (influenza, TB).
2. Contact with a contaminated surface or object (Norwalk virus), food (salmonella, E. coli), blood (HIV, hepatitis B), or water (cholera)
3. Bites from insects or animals capable of transmitting the disease (mosquito: malaria and yellow fever; flea: plague)
4. Travel through the air, such as tuberculosis or measles