US President Donald Trump’s DOGE-disastered public health agencies are no longer testing for the avian flu. And nobody has said it’s anywhere near over. What’s going on? And what dangers have been left flapping in the breeze?
This isn’t really the way to handle a potentially COVID-level public health emergency, is it?
‘Looking the other way’…
We’ve just learned that the big US public health agencies charged with keeping track of emerging mass health threats are no longer testing on farms and across the food chain for avian flu. That’s nit supposed to be the way you deal with something like the recent avian flu outbreak, is it? Not the way I would have expected. And probably not what legions of concerned, egg-starved Americans were expecting, either.
Critics say staff- and resource-strapped DOGE-ravaged agencies such the CDC, the FDA and USDA are unable to do anything but stand back and watch what happens, rather than proactively going into the field and trying to head off nasty new developments in the bird flu crisis.
Awareness suffering
Average folks should not ‘confuse the government’s silence with safety’, a Food & Wine update warns. “Public health professionals warn that the rollback of testing undermines pandemic preparedness, urging local engagement and continued monitoring at the state level.”
“Bird flu remains a serious public health concern,” Dr. Tyler B. Evans, CEO and cofounder of Wellness and Equity Alliance, a national alliance of public health clinicians committed to transforming health care delivery to vulnerable communities, shared with Food & Wine. “Pulling back on surveillance only heightens the risk, especially for rural communities and those with close contact to livestock. This is not the time to take our foot off the gas when it comes to monitoring zoonotic threats.”
No ‘first line of defense’
“And, as veterinarian Dr. Kay Russo recently told 60 Minutes, with the lack of information from the government, it’s like, ‘we’re given a stick, and they put a blindfold on us, and we’re sent into a gunfight, and we’re losing. We are losing’.”
All of which is not to say that public health officials have given up altogether on tracking the Avian flu. Dr. Robert Goldstein, the Massachusett’s Department of Public Health Commissioner, and a member of the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness, says the state is continuing its own, “ongoing collaboration with our agricultural partners,” to, “institute dairy farm testing across the state.” Goldstein added, “We were the first state to do so, and we remain the only state to do it at scale.
What ordinary folks can do
Concerned Americans are urged to remain in contact with their own local and state public health officials to stay abreast of their specific situations. And to urge them to continue ‘serious’ avian flu testing.
My take
Jacob Lemieux, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, puts it this way: On a scale of one to 10, he’d rate his concerns about the bird flu turning into a pandemic at ‘a six or a seven’. And that’s nothing to shake a stick at.
“We’re entering a dangerous era where access to basic health data is no longer guaranteed,” Evans observes. “It’s a reminder that health outcomes are shaped as much by political and social decisions as by pathogens themselves.”
My own 2 cents…
Tossing in my own 2 cents, I suggest that state and local officials also set up regular briefings for news organizations and the public on the Avian flu situation. Even if there was nothing new to report on a weekly basis, it would ensure that average Americans are kept up-to-date on a potentially disastrous situation…
And, if something of COVID-like proportions does happen, public health officials should not hesitate to place blame squarely in Donald Trump’s – and Elon Musk’s – laps…
~ Maggie J.