The Trump Administration is going to war to prevent an epidemic from a new strain of Ebola hemorrhagic fever that can be spread by animals, but Trump’s team demands that the World Health Organization follow the U.S. with budget cuts and greater efficiencies.
With the World Health Organization confirming the diagnosis of three Ebola deaths and a number of suspected cases in the northern Congo on May 9, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price M.D. arrived on the ground within a week for a tour of the Central African nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea on May 17. The area was the epicenter of the December 2013 to March 2016 Ebola epidemic that had a 39.5 percent kill rate, with 11,310 fatalities of the 28,616 suspected cases.
Dr. Price visited Libera first because the nation had the highest death toll with 4,810 dying in the last outbreak. Liberia was also the last African nation to be declared free of new Ebola transmission cases on June 9, 2016.
The new outbreak is especially dangerous because Science Magazine reported that Ebola has mutated to become highly zoonosis, which means it can jump from mammal to mammal. The first new Ebola case involved a Central African bush hunter that came in contact with a carcass of a dead boar. But just as the hunter developed symptoms, 84 domestic pigs died in 8 surrounding villages. Many epidemiologists worry that the dead pigs mean Ebola has already entered the African food supply.
After Secretary Price traveled to the African region, he flew to Geneva, Switzerland to address the May 22 opening of the 70th World Health Assembly. Price told the audience that as only the third physician to ever to head HHS, the Trump Administration wants to take an active role in helping to select the next Director-General of WHO.
Price bluntly stated that the United States looked forward to working the new Director to take a “clear-eyed view of what needs to change for it to fulfill that most important mission: ensuring a rapid and focused response to potential global health crises. Reform, with this focus, must be this organization’s Number One priority.” Price emphasized “how committed the United States is to a cooperative, transparent and effective international response to outbreaks of infectious disease. These threats do not respect borders between countries, and can spread rapidly to endanger people anywhere around the globe.”
Price trumpeted that the proposed Trump HHS budget supports a “robust commitment to preventing waste, fraud, and abuse across the department,” while providing the “highest level of quality, accessibility, and choices.”
Secretary Price made clear that he expects the next leader of the WHO to adopt the type of spending constraint and greater efficiencies that the Trump Administration’s ‘Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again.’ The FY 2018 spending plan released on March 13, proposes to cut $7.2 billion from the National Institutes of Health, more than $1.3 billion from the Centers for Diseases Control, and $800 million from the Food and Drug Administration budget.
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