Tensions Builds As CDC Stares Down Barrel Of Major Budget Cuts - WP

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is being roiled by internal dissension as the nation's top public health agency is facing such unprecedented threats as bioterrorism, a potential flu pandemic and the obesity epidemic, say current and former officials and several outside experts. The Atlanta-based agency has been thrown into turmoil by a combination of factors, including the upheaval of a drawn-out restructuring, the departure of dozens of its most respected scientists, concerns about political interference and a pending budget cut of nearly $500 million, they say.

Although the impact remains a matter of debate, the uproar is causing widespread alarm among public health authorities, and some say the deep discord may have already contributed to several recent crucial missteps, including confused messages during this winter's flu vaccine shortage, an embarrassing error in a highly publicized estimate of obesity's toll, and a failed program to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of front-line health workers against smallpox to prepare for a possible bioterrorist attack.

Last week, an independent panel of the National Academy of Sciences criticized the CDC for failing to provide clear leadership in the smallpox vaccination campaign and suggested that political "constraints" imposed by Washington played a role. The tumult has been exacerbated, say some current and former agency employees, by CDC Director Julie L. Gerberding's management style. Her critics say she tends to squelch open discussion and has failed to protect the agency from the specter of deep budget cuts and undue influence from Washington.

Taken together, the turbulence at the agency has created a "crisis of confidence" and an atmosphere of fear in which employees feel "cowed into silence," wrote one top CDC official, Robert A. Keegan, in a widely circulated memo to Gerberding and other top leaders."

EDIT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10399-2005Mar5.html

why money spent on public health also protects THEM.

Those shortsighted greedy nitwits really think their money and a guard at the gate is going to protect them from disease.

HA!

It'll open your eyes to the astonishing heights (depths?) our shortsightedness can reach.

The "Spanish" flu of 1918 killed an estimated 100 million people (probably low) around the world. It's only a matter of time before another influenza virus migrates from bird to human and then mutates to spread from human to human. Every virus that infects a cell creates up to 10,000 copies of itself - with numerous mutations, any one of which could be the one that allows the spread from human to human.

The great influenza probably started in Kansas in June of 1918. By December it had spread around the world. If SARS mutates to spread from human to human, my advice is head for the hills. The CDC will be powerless - particularly with a huge cut in funding. With funding they can begin work on a vaccine, provide doctors and nurses to care for the sick (many died in the Great Influenza because people were terrified of helping one another - many died from dehydration.)

It's just another travesty of the Bushco.

1. Reduces SS costs - since we will kill more people with bacterial and viral diseases.

2. A return to Bush's "Gilded Age" of President McKinley.