Scientists Were Hunting for the Next Ebola. Now the U.S. #TRUMP Has Cut Off Their Funding.

[riversedge]

This is a small amount of money--but it was cut off by the Trump Admin.
We need basic science such as this. We need to vote out the Trump--and the stupid dangerous administration!

Link to tweet

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Scientists Were Hunting for the Next Ebola. Now the U.S. #TRUMP Has Cut Off Their Funding.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/health/predict-usaid-viruses.html

Predict, a government research program, sought to identify animal viruses that might infect humans and to head off new pandemics.
Arlette Kavugho, 40, mother of six and an Ebola survivor, carries Kambale Eloge, 16 months old, whose mother died of the disease, in Katwa, near Butembo, Democratic Republic of Congo. USAID’s Predict project helped identify Ebola’s routes of transmission.


By Donald G. McNeil Jr.

Oct. 25, 2019

In a move that worries many public health experts, the federal government is quietly shutting down a surveillance program for dangerous animal viruses that someday may infect humans.

The United Nations Environment Program estimates that a new animal disease that can also infect humans is discovered every four months. Ending the program, experts fear, will leave the world more vulnerable to lethal pathogens like Ebola and MERS that emerge from unexpected places, such as bat-filled trees, gorilla carcasses and camel barns.

The program, known as Predict and run by the United States Agency for International Development, was inspired by the 2005 H5N1 bird flu scare. Launched 10 years ago, the project has cost about $207 million.

The initiative has collected over 140,000 biological samples from animals and found over 1,000 new viruses, including a new strain of Ebola. Predict also trained about 5,000 people in 30 African and Asian countries, and has built or strengthened 60 medical research laboratories, mostly in poor countries.



Dennis Carroll, the former director of USAID’s emerging threats division who helped design Predict, oversaw it for a decade and retired when it was shut down. The surveillance project is closing because of “the ascension of risk-averse bureaucrats,” he said.

Because USAID’s chief mission is economic aid, he added, some federal officials felt uncomfortable funding cutting-edge science like tracking exotic pathogens.


Congress, along with the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, were “enormously supportive,” said Dr. Carroll, who is now a fellow at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service.

“But things got complicated in the last two years, and by January, Predict was essentially collapsed into hibernation.”

The end of the program “is definitely a loss,” said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit global health organization that received funding from the program. “Predict was an approach to heading off pandemics, instead of sitting there waiting for them to emerge and then mobilizing. That’s expensive."



“The United States spent $5 billion fighting Ebola in West Africa,” he added. “This costs far less.”

The goal of Predict was to speed up and organize the previously haphazard hunt for zoonotic diseases — those that may jump from animals to humans. In recent years, scientists have discovered many lethal viruses lurking in wild and domestic animals.

It has long been known, of course, that AIDS originated in chimpanzees and probably was first contracted by bushmeat hunters. Ebola circulates in bats and apes, while SARS was found in captive civet cats in China.

In South Asia, Nipah virus reaches humans through pigs or date palm sap infected by bats carrying the virus. In Saudi Arabia, MERS also is carried by bats; they infect camels, which then infect humans. The virus can jump from human to human, especially in hospitals.

Novel influenza viruses originate in migratory ducks and geese. The viruses spread first to domestic poultry flocks, then to pigs and humans. Mutations picked up along that viral highway can render the viruses far more dangerous.

These discoveries led to new ways of preventing spillovers of infections into human populations: closing markets where wildlife is butchered for food,; putting bamboo skirts on sap-collection jars to keep bats out; or penning pigs and camels in places where they cannot eat fruit that bats have gnawed.

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Arlette Kavugho, 40, mother of six and an Ebola survivor, carries Kambale Eloge, 16 months old, whose mother died of the disease, in Katwa, near Butembo, Democratic Republic of Congo. USAID’s Predict project helped identify Ebola’s routes of transmission.Credit...Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
Donald G. McNeil Jr.

[CaptYossarian]

1. Our first priority should be to find a cure for Trump.

Abolish the Electoral College.

Send Mitch to a nice turtle retirement community.

Impeach/remove Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Alito.

Shred Citizens United and bring back McCain-Feingold.

Incarcerate Bill Barr.

(Not in any order, of course.)

[gordianot]

7. I like your list.

One way to look at this Trump has a real talent in spite of obvious problems he creates new opportunities get himself in trouble. There must be a proportional ratio in invoking “hoax” and the creation of unforeseen consequences created from ignorance.

[CaptYossarian]

8. He thinks he's invincible.

They "can't indict a sitting president", but he won't be sitting forever. Once he's John Q. Public again, what's his fate?

I didn't include jailing his 3 oldest and Jared because once reality slaps the orange off his face, their lives won't be worth anything. They're the reasons I'm glad we didn't close Gitmo. All the Trump crime family and his cohorts belong down there, but that's after the rest of my original list sees fruition..

[dchill]

2. Works for him. He would kill us all for...

...voting for Obama.

[PaulRevere08]

3. Again I find myself asking "Why is the media not making all Americans aware that

their government has failed them."?

This is so simple to show that to pay for a small fraction of the 1% Tax Cut Trump has put all Americans at serious risk!

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

6. No kidding, that should be pointed out far and wide...

... but with the state of communications at this point, so many would call it, "fake news".

[G_j]

4. K&R

[Pobeka]

5. GOP has no vision, chooses the economic disaster over low cost prevention far too often.

Time and time again, these idiots have no vision for the future beyond the next month or year at the most.

So instead of spending a fraction of the money now on prevention and getting ahead of a problem, they cost us many time more than that in the long run when a preventable disaster strikes.

And that's just the economic part of it, the emotional and human suffering costs are just as real.

[ffr]

9. I was just going to post this too, the Bush era program called Predict.

VOTE DEMOCRATIC! VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS ONLY!