This is going to be a very, very short rant expressing my outrage over the fact that all indices are pointing to a probable cholera epidemic in New Orleans over the next few days.
Cholera! In the US! It's unbelievable. Cholera is a disease common to the third world. It usually is communicated by drinking water that has been contaminated with feces. It can happen anywhere, but our public health infrastructure in the US usually deals with this sort of thing very quickly.
But I can almost hear my old boss at the Health Dept. saying "well, I don't know what you expect-republicans are in charge." You have no idea how many public health nurses were republicans when they first started working in public health and changed their registration to Democrat after a few years experience.
It is well known in public health circles that a republican administration will attempt to gut public health funding a la Reagan and Bush the first's attempts to slash immunization and school lunch funding, it'll always be something. Under Democrats, public health blossoms to keep vectors of disease, morbidity and mortality under control.
As we see now in New Orleans, Public Health is not a frill.
Now, you might say that none of this has any bearing on natural disasters because of the uncontrollable nature of them, but you'd be exactly wrong. It's public health/public safety's job to be prepared for this sort of thing, and when adequately funded and competently managed, they do a great job of it.
Normally what happens is that when local and state authorities can't manage, they call on the fed, and the fed sends the National Guard to help out, which-trust me on this-the National Guard excels at.
But it is at precisely this point that the mismanagement starts-we have no National Guard to speak of because they are busy getting blown up in Iraq. One of our essential safety mechanisms has been squandered, thanks to incompetent management.
Public health agencies, whose new CDC mandate is about finding ways to deny essential reproductive care to those who need it most, find themselves completely unable to even address the scope of the looming public health disaster in New Orleans. Will we see Doctors Without Borders in New Orleans? Should we start a pool on this question? No, we won't. Tulane University, the premiere school of tropical medicine in this country, will take over and manage the epidemics that are bound to follow this.
Cholera. Typhoid. In the United States! Unbelieveable. Is this what we've descended to? Third-world diseases?
It's unconscionable.