The Republican fetish with starving government has helped land West Africa in an Ebola crisis. The director of the National Institutes of Health made that clear when he told Huffington Post that steep budget cuts by Congress has set back the institute's work on both prevention and treatment for the disease and that if it hadn't been for a decade's worth of cuts, "we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."
It's not just the NIH that's suffered, and it's not just in Africa where the cuts are harming people. The Center for Disease Control's emergency preparedness budget has been nearly cut in half in just the past seven years. That means preparation at home. That means that local health departments in this country don't have the funding—or the staff—they need to do the necessary preparation and training to deal with any epidemic. Judy Stone, MD is an infectious disease specialist, details the cuts at Scientific American.
The CDC’s discretionary funding was cut by $585 million during [2010-14]. Shockingly, annual funding for the CDC’s public health preparedness and response efforts were $1 billion lower for 2013 fiscal year than for 2002. These funding decreases have resulted in more than 45,700 job losses at state and local health departments since 2008. Again, it is not just the Ebola that is a looming threat. We need to worry about vaccine-preventable but neglected infections like influenza, measles, and whooping cough; the serious emerging viral infections in the US like Enterovirus-D68, chikungunya and dengue, as well as overseas MERS and bird flus, and natural disasters.
I wonder did they realize they were taking away the just in case safety nets the ones that help the world or are they still wearing the blinders that only allow then to see their jobs for the last 6 years with two more to go to wreck and deny this President anything, I'm beginning to think they didn't because all they've done in advancing that agenda really has been done to you and their faithful base, that's going to be something when they wake up and realize they are being zoomed, actually I think they just don't care about job pledge base voters and definitely not about us or our Hispanic brethren, if they did would they be so brazen about announcing what they will do next?
note the time line this downward spiral of support started under Bush and the republican congress keep's it alive it's their nature save money on the important stuff and waste it on unfounded witch hunts and committee's lost in space because they never find what the alleged exist including voter fraud but that's only because they don't investigate themselves.
