Saturday, October 18, 2014

Ebola, Republican budgets, and our safety


The Republican hysteria machine is at full throttle on the Ebola case.  Texas Governor Rick Perry and Congressional candidate are practicing the campaign of “Look over there !”  They focus on a campaign to denounce the White House for not banning flights from West Africa.  ( There are few  direct flights from West Africa to the U.S.). the campaign is designed to get readers to look at the flight’s as the fear issue.  That is, to look away from the Congressional action that cut the CDC budget by almost 50 % last year. This budget cut  produced a CDC that did not have the funds to adequately train hospital workers and nurses for infectious control and did not provide infection control equipment. See the statement by the Nurses here


We should keep some basics in mind.  Last year some 32,000 people died in the U.S. of influenza while some 40% of Americans have not yet received their vaccine for the flu.

Recall that in August and September the Republican hysteria machine promoted the "Crisis on the border" on migrant children,  This allowed Perry and the Republicans to avoid talking about their refusal to expand Medicaid for adults in Texas.  The failure to expand Medicaid for adults led directly to the flooding of emergency wards in hospitals in Texas, like the Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. But, we won't hear much about that. 

No comments:

 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.