The austerity bandwagon has little regard for the socioeconomic impact of their policies. But there is one area where no amount of wealth will protect them.
Epidemics.
A variety of viruses and bacteria that create widespread illness and death.
We have developed since the nineteenth century a system in this country to contain epidemics and in order to reduce outbreaks to put into place health policy that reduces the incidence of disease proliferation.
But these programs are not free. In fact as opposed to say a military tank that could be mothballed for decades at little cost, these programs need constant funds in order to do the valuable research to find the best way to combat the next outbreak.
This attempt to drown Lady Liberty in the bathtub has exposed how the CDC is now struggling to address the threat of Ebola while pinching pennies.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases, spelled out the impact of the cuts in dire terms during a recent hearing on Capitol Hill.
"I have to tell you honestly it's been a significant impact on us," Fauci said. "It has both in an acute and a chronic, insidious way eroded our ability to respond in the way that I and my colleagues would like to see us be able to respond to these emerging threats. And in my institute particularly, that's responsible for responding on the dime to an emerging infectious disease threat, this is particularly damaging."
CNN on CDC budget cuts
Dr. Peter Piot the doctor that discovered the Ebola virus is aware of the need for a comprehensive epidemic system. As are most scientists.
JB: Strengthening health systems seems to be the thing we need most to make sure all nations can identify and respond to outbreaks like this, but that's also the hardest thing to fix.
PP: I don't think you can fix it. Each country is different. There is an illusion that there is one fix for the three neighboring countries [battling Ebola — e.g. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea]. But they all have different problems. It's important to have a commitment to the long-term view — so when we're talking about global health programs and international development, that there is the long-term view that includes building health systems. That's not a matter of two or five years, that's ten years you need as a horizon.
JB: Those long-term timelines don't exactly square with political agendas, which are short term. What happens when the political will and interest falls away?
PP: We've been there before. After war, we say 'never again.' After Katrina, we say 'we'll do this and that,' and then it gets out of the public eye. I don't know how to do it. I hope that the Ebola epidemic is a wake up call for that if we don't invest more in these health systems, that we are at risk for a repetition of the current Ebola crisis.
Dr. Peter Piot interview
And when it comes down to the wire. We already have pathogens that have migrated here decades ago. All it needs is sufficient social degradation for its hosts to proliferate:
Religion remained an important but less all-encompassing framework for understanding these outbreaks. The religious response to cholera during the early 1830s was intense, a reflection of a growing prebellum evangelicalism. However, after the end of the Civil War, the response to the threatening and then real cholera epidemic of 1866 indicated a growing secularism and the beginnings of an administrative capacity to deal with such threats, as I have argued elsewhere [5, 7]. Medicine also had new intellectual tools at its disposal. Well-informed physicians were now aware that cholera was likely spread through human waste and the water supply. Of equal significance, urban governments and, later, international bodies could begin to address the problem of epidemic illness, especially plague and cholera [8].
History of epidemics in US
Cholera is why we shut down the water supply when there has been a breach of the supply system. But there is a more pressing source of waste based contamination. Our culture has decided to commodify bodily functions. This means restrooms are restricted in access with money spent usually being the entry fee. This creates a situation where human waste is left exposed and could create a health hazard.
And then there are vermin based contagions
Modern Plague
The third pandemic, the Modern Plague, began in China in the 1860s and appeared in Hong Kong by 1894. Over the next 20 years, it spread to port cities around the world by rats on steamships. The pandemic caused approximately 10 million deaths (Khan, 2004). During this last pandemic, scientists identified the causative agent as a bacterium and determined that plague is spread by infectious flea bites. Rat-associated plague was soon brought under control in most urban areas, but the infection easily spread to local populations of ground squirrels and other small mammals in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. These new species of carriers have allowed plague to become endemic in many rural areas, including the western U.S.
However, as a bacterial disease, plague can be treated with antibiotics, and can be prevented from spreading by prompt identification, treatment and management of human cases. Applications of effective insecticides to control the flea vectors also provide assistance in controlling plague.
CDC
There isn't a system in place for widespread quarantine, as we saw with the Katrina response, our infrastructure was dealt a fatal blow by Reaganomics. I'm sure that in every state the municipal last chance hospitals in each county have ER wait rooms that are packed continuously. (The limited coverage of Medicaid was not alleviated by Obamacare). These waiting rooms are incubators for the spread of every disease. We have only been winning the vector lottery thus far in that regard.
Who could have foreseen?