When President Donald Trump came into office, he tasked the world’s richest man with making significant budget cuts that are now causing a “real-life horror movie” to unfold.
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A column by Ben Smilowitz, the founder of the Disaster Accountability Project and SmartResponse.org, warned that the situation with Ebola in Africa is growing worse by the day and it’s due in part to the massive budget cuts to international public health funds.
This outbreak isn’t the first, but former administrations dealt with it in dramatically different ways. When the outbreak began in 2014, the Obama administration deployed personnel to West Africa and built a coordinated response with countries around the world.
“Between 2014-2016, 11,000 people died across multiple West African countries after experiencing multiple organ failure and uncontrollable bleeding, vomiting, and diarrhea,” wrote Smilowitz in “The Hill.”
The new version of Ebloa is more deadly, he explained. There are already more than 900 suspected cases and at least 230 deaths. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health found that each infected person transmits the virus to 1.5 to 2.5 others. There is no cure.
It has been 18 months since the Trump administration “dismantled USAID, withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization, fired thousands of skilled public health experts, and cut 615 of 770 identifiable USAID global health awards (totaling $12.7 billion) that funded disease surveillance, outbreak prevention, emergency response, and crisis operations,” the column said.
All of the work that was done after the first Ebola outbreak to prevent such a disaster was “demolished,” explained Smilowitz.
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He called on Congress to restore the public health infrastructure that would ensure “rapid testing, trained health workers, protective equipment, case isolation, safe transport, contact tracing, community trust, and international coordination.”
The plan, Smilowitz said, begins with restoring funding specifically for the Ebola response. Second, he called for USAID and CDC to be restored and completely rebuilt. He also urged that the U.S. “reengage the World Health Organization” at the level that it once was. That includes the “technical working groups, emergency coordination, data-sharing, expert deployments and funding channels tied to outbreak response.” Such a relationship could help ensure early-warning systems are in place and rapid response teams could be deployed.
Smilowitz also called on the U.S. to fund research into different Ebola strains, as well as research into developing vaccines and therapeutics. It would ensure that responses could be much faster in the future.
Finally, he said that the U.S. must step in to fund “groups on the ground, on the front-lines, working to treat individuals and prevent the spread of this deadly virus.” They have basic needs that could easily be funded, like feeding health workers as well as the infected who are quarantining or even items like soap.
He closed by calling the matter a “dire warning” that Congress should act on, because the president doesn’t have the best track record in navigating disease outbreaks.
“The Trump administration has proven its absolute disregard for public health preparedness. Congressional leadership is therefore needed to guide life-saving investments,” wrote Smilowitz. “When the U.S. actively demonstrates its leadership and applies its technical expertise to stop outbreaks, infection rates and death rates plummet. … Diseases don’t care about ideology or politics and will simply spread at faster and faster rates.”
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