OK, that header's maybe a bit hyperbolic. But we're seeing an interesting and immediate effect of state-level austerity measures here in Hawai‘i: a sudden outbreak of dengue fever:
www.staradvertiser.com/news/20110402_Mosquito_control_is_slapped_by_cuts.html
Yes, we're the state famous for cutting seventeen days out of the school year with our "furlough day" program. The ripple effect of those cuts won't really be felt for a few years on, when students aren't competing with their peers on the Mainland (they aren't already, but that's another story). But this disease outbreak is the more or less immediate effect of cuts.
More below the fold:
To help tackle the latest outbreak of dengue fever, a member of the state House Health Committee wants to restore at least a handful of positions at the state Department of Health, where a wave of cost-cutting in 2009 eliminated dozens of workers tasked with controlling mosquitoes and rats.
Cuts to the vector control unit at the Health Department have meant there are far fewer public health workers to help control the spread of a dengue fever
Those cuts, it should be pointed out, were made by the Republican Linda Lingle's administration. Yes, the Linda Lingle who had been on the list for McCain's running mate in 2008 but was thwarted by a much hotter, much less Jewish, much crazier Sarah Palin.
The dengue outbreak was first reported last week--four cases in a neighborhood of Pearl City. The first cases of dengue since 2001. That number's now up to twelve.
During the 2001 dengue fever outbreak that hit East Maui, Oahu, Kauai and the Big Island, the Health Department had dozens of vector control workers on Oahu alone who helped homeowners eliminate standing water, put larvicide in pools and other standing water and even introduced mosquito-eating fish into ponds, said Gary Gill, the Health Department’s deputy director for environment. The 2001 outbreak sickened 153 people.
The Health Department also relied in 2001 on an additional 250 employees, outside vector control, who volunteered to “go into dengue-infested areas around the North Shore with teaching tools and demonstrated how to eradicate mosquitoes,” Gill said. “There was the real possibility they were exposing themselves to dengue fever, but 250 people were willing to go beyond the call at great personal risk. These are good people.”
Today what’s left of the vector control operation on Oahu is staffed by two entomologists, a worker at Honolulu Airport and one inspector each for East Oahu and West Oahu.
Just as disconcerting and potentially even more disastrous are Lingle's cuts to one of our little known but critical state agencies: The Department of Agriculture's Plant Quarantine Branch, which lost a third of its inspectors in 2009. The DOA is the agency charged with controlling alien species--both preventing their arrival and eradicating them once they're here. Obviously it's a bad idea, a very bad idea, to have alien species establish themselves on closed island ecosystems, particularly ones as fragile and unique as we have in the Hawaiian Islands. The DOA are the guys who inspect planes arriving from Guam, for example, to make sure that a brown tree snake hasn't managed to get aboard. (Sometimes they do). Brown tree snakes are alien to Guam, and since their deliberate introduction there to try and control the rat population, they've utterly wiped out Guam's native birds. Eggs are, apparently, much easier to catch than rodents.
The estimated cost should the brown tree snake get to Hawai‘i? Billions of dollars.
Then there's the little-known episode involving Hokule‘a, a replica of an ancient Polynesian sailing canoe that's been traveling throughout the Pacific since the 1970s--Hokule‘a is a symbol of the Hawaiian Renaissance movement, and it is currently on a round-the-world journey. Returning from a voyage to Palmyra Atoll hundreds of miles south of Hawai‘i, crew members complained of mysterious itching. Turns out that a tiny insect, a no-see-um, had infested the canoe and was harassing crewmembers. The DOA in conjunction with Bishop Museum scientists intercepted the canoe and exterminated the bugs before it reached the shores of Hawai‘i. Had that bug gotten to our white, sandy beaches (in which they breed), not only would they have made lying on the beach unbearable, it would have impacted the tourist industry, the Islands' bread and butter, to the tune of many more billions.
These state agencies are not a "drain" on the resources of our treasury. They're investments in our future. Without them and the invisible work they do, Hawai‘i could become a festering, fevered swamp.
If spending needs to be reduced, so be it. Maybe the state of Hawai‘i shouldn't go ahead with its proposed $5.5 billion dollar light rail system, which broke ground last month and which, when complete ten years hence (if there are no delays and there are alwaysdelays, will serve only one narrow corridor in urban Honolulu. It's really a question of priorities: Do we want snake-free, bug-free and disease-free communities, or do we want a shiny new train?