Trump's budget makes Super Gonorrhea great again
Super Gonorrhea Is About to Get the Trump Bump
The president’s budget is not friendly to the programs trying to save antibiotics and fight superbugs.
MADDIE OATMANJUL. 12, 2017 4:25 PM
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/07/super-gonorrhea-is-about-to-get-the-trump-bump/
The overuse of certain antibiotics has dulled their ability to fight infections, leading to such maladies as untreatable “super gonorrhea.” When world leaders gathered in Germany for the first-ever G20 Health Ministers meeting in May, they called for a “coordinated global response” to antibiotic resistance, currently “one of the biggest threats to global health.” But in stark contrast to the G20 leaders’ efforts, President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers in the United States are instead proposing to make deep cuts to, and in some cases eliminate, the federal programs focused on battling this resistance.
At least 2 million Americans fight infections that are resistant to antibiotics every year, and 23,000 die from them, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “As more strains of bacteria become resistant to an ever-larger number of antibiotics, our drug choices have become increasingly limited,” noted the White House’s “National Strategy for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria” in 2014, adding ominously that we could soon be in a world in which “modern medical advances such as surgery, transplants, and chemotherapy may no longer be viable due to the threat of infection.” To address these concerns, in 2016 Congress funded the CDC to the tune of $160 million to create the Antibiotic Resistance Solutions Initiative (ARSI) to try to improve detection and containment of resistant infections across the country.
But that funding, and therefore the entire initiative, could soon vanish. Trump’s 2018 budget seeks to cut the ARSI budget by roughly $23 million, and it would shift the source of funding from the general CDC fund to its Prevention and Public Health Fund. Yes, that’s the very same fund that the Republican-controlled Senate is hoping to eliminate completely with its latest health care bill. In short, the combination of Trump’s budget and the Senate’s bill would effectively suffocate ARSI.
“That would be not only a tremendous risk to patients and public health, but also a waste of the money that was spent over the past two years on this effort,” said Amanda Jezek, the vice president of public policy and government at the Infectious Diseases Society of America, a group that represents doctors, scientists, and other health care professionals.