The Zika virus is a very scary thing indeed, and it is on the march here in America.
As of June 22, 820 cases have been reported in U.S. states and the District of Columbia, and another 1,860 cases have been reported in U.S. territories.
In February, President Obama requested $1.9 billion from Congress to fund Zika virus prevention. Congressional Republicans have responded with a bill that provides $1.1 billion in funding plus $622 million in reallocated funds.
It’s not everything President Obama asked for, but under ordinary circumstances he’d probably be eager to sign it. But he can’t sign this bill.
Why? Because Republicans have loaded the bill with a GOP wish list of exemptions from the Clean Water Act. Emergency pesticide use in cases like stopping the Zika virus is already exempt from these Clean Water Act regulations, but Republicans are counting on voters not to make such a fine distinction and just deregulate pesticide use in general. This bill also includes language prohibiting taxpayer funding for abortion (because the Zika virus causes birth defects), but the Hyde Amendment already prohibits that to begin with.
Republicans want to force President Obama to veto the bill so it looks like he doesn’t care about stopping the Zika virus — even though he asked for this funding back in February. It’s a poison pill: burying deal-breaker language in a piece of seemingly uncontroversial legislation just to embarrass your political opponents when they can’t support it, and it’s a tactic that both sides use all the time.
Since both sides agree that the funding is necessary, the games that politicians on Capitol Hill are playing with this legislation are wasting valuable time in the eyes of the people whose job it is to actually prevent the disease.
This is no way to fight an epidemic…Three months is an eternity for control of an outbreak. There is a narrow window of opportunity here, and it’s closing. Every day that passes makes it harder to stop Zika.”
A fairly brilliant treatise on health policy from Late Night host Seth Meyers. And, you have to admit “Amendment 69” is funny regardless of whether you support or oppose it.
It will certainly be fascinating to watch what happens in Colorado if this thing passes.
Support among the American public for quarantine appears at this point to be overwhelming. You can know this if you walk down the street and ask people, or if you look at a CBS poll that found 80% of respondents think citizens returning from West Africa should be quarantined until it’s clear they do not have the disease.
But America’s ‘professionals’ in the scientific and medical communities, and certainly those in the White House, seem deeply uninterested in the views of common people. When pressed on the issue they, especially the president, offer only gobbledygook and slogans. We can’t be safe here until they’re safe over there! They sound like propagandists for Bleeding Belgium in World War I.
Peggy Noonan, “From Ellis Island to Ebola,” 10/31/2014
Leave it to right-leaning columnist Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal to write something so transparently xenophobic that it defies all logic.
That “gobbledygook” Noonan is talking about is just the medical science she can’t understand. And she is not alone in her ignorance…which is no wonder why the scientific and medical “professionals” she is referring to “seem deeply uninterested in the views of common people.”
This from the same “common people” who wanted to quarantine AIDS patients in 1985 despite an understanding among public health professionals from years before how AIDS was and was not transmitted.
This propaganda piece appeared on page 14 of the New York Tribune on November 5, 1917. It made the emotional case that the United States needed to go to war to protect Belgium from Germany as a matter of U.S. national security.
Considering that “common people” like Peggy Noonan describe medical and public health terminology as “gobbledygook,” thank goodness the professionals are disinterested in their views!
The end of the excerpt from Noonan compares the Democrats in the White House and the medical scientists to the U.S. Committee on Public Information propagandists from World War I who made the case that we needed to go to war in Germany to protect “Bleeding Belgium,” specifically making the argument that failing to protect Belgium made the United States less safe.
But Noonan’s failure to understand far more recent history makes her argument more comical ironic than absurd. Consider this November 16, 2002 quote from President George W. Bush as he made the case to go to war in Iraq.
We are committed to defending the nation. Yet wars are not won on the defensive. The best way to keep America safe from terrorism is to go after terrorists where they plan and hide.
In her column, Noonan told the story of Thomas Duncan, the Liberian national who died from Ebola after coming to the United States (and infecting at least two nurses who cared for him). He had originally tested negative before he left Africa but ultimately incubated enough of the virus to kill him.
As you might imagine, Duncan’s family has a few questions about the care he received.
To Noonan, this was a great reason to keep nurse Kaci Hickox — who had tested negative for Ebola and showed no symptoms — under mandatory quarantine after her return from Sierra Leone, where she temporarily worked with Doctors without Borders. (Hickox is also an employee of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which certainly complicates matters a bit since she knows a thing or two about public health and epidemiology.)
Never mind that the only two people who became infected with Ebola because of Duncan were the nurses who cared for him. (After all, who else was coming into contact with his bodily fluids?)
By the way, Thomas Duncan entered the United States on a flight from — where else? — Belgium.
Now that the Ebola virus has reached the United States, there is understandably a lot of panic about it. The news media certainly isn’t helping to put our minds at ease.
Ebola certainly is a scary disease, but even in Africa, it’s way down the list of causes of death.
Graphic courtesy of World Health Organization.
That’s not to say that Ebola is not a terrible and deadly disease — it is — but once we are reminded that it only spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids (including human waste), then we may be more able to be more rational about it.
One major advantage that we have in the United States that people in West African nations lack is modern sanitation. In its list of Ten Great Public Health Achievements in the 20th Century, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed infectious disease control as a top achievement and improvements in sanitation and hygiene as crucial strategies.
Disease control resulted from improvements in sanitation and hygiene, the discovery of antibiotics, and the implementation of universal childhood vaccination programs….
The 19th century shift in population from country to city that accompanied industrialization and immigration led to overcrowding in poor housing served by inadequate or nonexistent public water supplies and waste-disposal systems. These conditions resulted in repeated outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, TB, typhoid fever, influenza, yellow fever, and malaria.
By 1900, however, the incidence of many of these diseases had begun to decline because of public health improvements, implementation of which continued into the 20th century. Local, state, and federal efforts to improve sanitation and hygiene reinforced the concept of collective “public health” action (e.g., to prevent infection by providing clean drinking water). By 1900, 40 of the 45 states had established health departments. The first county health departments were established in 1908. From the 1930s through the 1950s, state and local health departments made substantial progress in disease prevention activities, including sewage disposal, water treatment, food safety, organized solid waste disposal, and public education about hygienic practices (e.g., foodhandling and handwashing). Chlorination and other treatments of drinking water began in the early 1900s and became widespread public health practices, further decreasing the incidence of waterborne diseases. The incidence of TB also declined as improvements in housing reduced crowding and TB-control programs were initiated. In 1900, 194 of every 100,000 U.S. residents died from TB; most were residents of urban areas. In 1940 (before the introduction of antibiotic therapy), TB remained a leading cause of death, but the crude death rate had decreased to 46 per 100,000 persons.
So that’s a reassuring feather in our cap when fighting Ebola here at home. But we can’t afford to get complacent about it.
Here in my home town of Indianapolis, we have a dirty little problem that nobody wanted to talk about for years. Storm drains that collect rainwater and dump it into waterways are commingled with sewer drains (this is known as a combined sewer system). So, whenever there’s a good rain, well you can probably guess the results.
Each year, the city of Indianapolis dumps between six and seven billion — that’s billion with a B! — gallons of raw, untreated waste into Eagle Creek, Fall Creek, Pleasant Run, Pogues Run and the White River.
That’s a lot of raw sewage overflowing into our waterways where people boat, fish and occasionally swim. Indianapolis’s sewer system is more than 100 years old and simply doesn’t have enough capacity. Scary stuff, especially in light of the Ebola outbreak.
The good news is that help for my hometown is on the way. Because these conditions were a violation of the Clean Water Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sued the city, which led to a settlement and a Consent Decree for the city to fix the sewage system. Essentially, the city is only doing it because the feds are making them do it. Politicians don’t want to be responsible for massive increases in utility rates.
The city, along with Citizens Energy Group, the public utility that operates the water, sewer and natural gas systems in Indianapolis, is currently building a massive tunnel system to add capacity and minimize (notice I didn’t say eliminate) the overflows. The bad news is that it won’t be done until May 2016.
Indianapolis is far from alone in its challenges with an antiquated sewer system. According to the EPA, there are 213 large systems (each serving 50,000 or more people) nationwide with combined sewer overflows and 1,103 additional large systems with sanitary sewer overflows. The goal is to address all of them by the end of FY2016 — but it will take years beyond that for all of the necessary projects to be completed.
Graphic courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Graphic courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
That’s why I find it totally incredulous that many voices within the GOP have proposed that we abolish the EPA altogether while simultaneously accusing the Obama administration of not being serious about protecting Americans from Ebola. Indeed, budget cuts have also hamstrung the CDC and the National Institutes of Health in their efforts to contain the disease and even develop a vaccine.
“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here.’ Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”
Dr. Francis Collins, Director, National Institutes of Health
Graphic courtesy of National Institutes of Health.
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