June 26, 2017

Defenseless by Choice?

Imagine being served, or having your “chef’s special” prepared by people unable to afford health care or safe, clean living environments? The wealthy clients of “Typhoid Mary,”,a typhoid carrier who decimated wealthy families which she served as a sought after cook in the early 20th century, has her counterparts everywhere that health care is inadequate or unavailable to the working poor.
Are we really so blind as to ignore the fact that disease precursors are constantly evolving new strains, which which immunizations can barely keep up today. Not only that, but are we absolutely sure that “biological warfare,” much studied and implemented, for example, on a massive scale (half a million deaths estimated) during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and China in the ’30s and ’40s, will not emerge again, especially using willing human carriers bent on suicide for a cause?

Plans by the Republicans in Congress and allies in the administration to, in effect, withdraw health care options now available via Obamacare, Medicaid and Medicare to the working poor and disadvantaged, along with targeted dismantling of biological warfare tools mentioned below, may have toxic consequences ignored at our peril.

Trump’s proposed budget plan calls for an $8 billion reduction to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with closing the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC).

These cuts could weaken U.S. preparedness for a biological attack or an emerging infectious disease. Daniel Gerstein, a former senior DHS official, recently stated that closing the NBACC could leave the nation at risk of a bioterror attack.

Recently, among records discarded by fleeing Isis fighters in Syria, was a laptop containing various future plans of the group.
Most interesting was that the laptop’s owner, identified as the holder of a degree in biological sciences from a Tunisian University, was teaching himself about the use of biological weaponry, in preparation for a potential attack that would have shocked the world.

(thanks to Homeland Security News and the Washington Post)

Dan Townsend,

New Mexico