State public health officials also warn that Texas isn’t prepared for a public health emergency. “We don’t really have a unifying construct for public health in Texas that’s comprehensive,” Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, the former commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, told the Texas Tribune. Between 2008 and 2013, 36 percent of local health departments in Texas had to lay off staff due to budget cuts between 2008 and 2013. It’s also worth remembering that Perry’s indictment has to do with concerns that he abused his power by trying to defund the Travis County District Attorney’s office after it opened an investigation into corruption in the state’s Cancer Prevention and Research Institute, when an official was indicted for misusing an $11 million grant. Not a great sign that Perry is managing medical research money as well as he might. At any rate, it’s ridiculous that Perry is now giving the president lectures about his handling of a health crisis that broke out in Perry’s own state. Then there’s the GOP crusade to cut federal spending on health agencies. The sequester cut $1.55 billion from the budget of the National Institutes of Health, took another $300 million from the Centers for Disease Control, slashed global health programs by $411 million and USAID by $289 million. The budgets drawn up by Rep. Paul Ryan and passed by the House GOP would have deepened those cuts significantly. The CDC’s budget has been cut $600 million since 2010. “I have to tell you honestly it’s been a significant impact on us,” the NIH’s Anthony Fauci told a Senate subcommittee last week. “It has both in an acute and a chronic, insidious way eroded our ability to respond in the way that I and my colleagues would like to see us be able to respond to these emerging threats.” So the president’s critics are right, though mostly for the wrong reasons. Our under-funded public health system means that Obama probably shouldn’t have called it “unlikely” that Ebola would reach our shores, or promise that we can certainly prevent its spread. “We have to work now so that this is not the world’s next AIDS,” CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden told the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meeting. That will require funding a stronger public health infrastructure at home and internationally. But Republicans are determined to use the disease to stoke fear and turn out their base in November. It may be working: An NBC online poll shows that 56 percent of Americans now want a ban on flights from countries that have seen an outbreak of Ebola. Fighting the disease will require engaging with the global public health community, not seceding from it, but xenophobia is a reliable standby in the GOP political toolkit. It just may be the wrong season to expect a serious bipartisan response to this crisis.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 00:56:21 +0000