On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive order To begin the process of withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization, the United Nations agency charged with protecting global public health. A day later, manage it directions Federal health agencies to temporarily stop communicating with the public, a directive that applies to the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other agencies under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The US couple will effectively separate US public health agencies from their international counterparts and cut off US health providers and research centers from information about infectious diseases, emerging epidemics, and even food-borne disease outbreaks and specifications.
“We live in a globalized world and diseases know no borders,” said Jonathan Patz, inaugural director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former author on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for 15 years. “If we take this short view of disease prevention and ignore the rest of the world, we do so at our peril.”
Humans and disease have always been in a tenuous balance. Recent advances in disease control and prevention such as vaccines and antibiotics have limited the effects of pathogens, but our control has never been absolute—as the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates. Climate change is tipping the balance against us by causing the planet to warm at an unprecedented rate and outpacing extreme weather, floods and droughts. A A growing body of research These shifts lead to an increase in ticks, mosquitoes, algae and other disease vectors, which expand into new territories and remain active for more months of the year, he notes.
A report published this month predicts that factors that depend on climate change will exhibit additional exposure 500 million people to malaria, dengue fever, and other diseases carried by organisms such as ticks and mosquitoes by mid-century. Other studies suggest that warmer temperatures It causes animals to mix into new patterns and exchange higher amounts of pathogens. Viruses that jump between species have a better chance of making the jump to humans, a phenomenon known as “billian pantherography” that has led to some of the most devastating disease in modern history, including HIV, HIV and Covid-19.
Withdrawing from, or from, the World Health Organization prevents the United States from getting ahead of these outbreaks and coordinating with other countries to respond to them.
“Especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, which has this very early, highly developed system,” said Arthur Wiens, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne and a former advisor to the World Health Organization. The system, a central database of information about disease outbreaks, is Designed to alert countries when an outbreak begins. Without it, “the United States would suddenly be completely blind to the outbreak in the rest of the world,” Wiens added.
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Trump’s decision to withdraw is no surprise. The President began the process of officially withdrawing from the organization, Citing her approach to the Covid-19 pandemicin 2020. Former President Joe Biden quickly reversed course upon taking office early the following year. Trump is wasting no time on this matter, which means the United States could officially end its relationship with the Who a year from now.
Not only does Trump’s decision diminish the United States from the rest of the world, it could have far-reaching consequences for the countries that remain in the WHO (every UN member other than the small European nation of Liechtenstein). On average, states pay about $100 million annually in membership fees. The United States, the organization’s largest funder, is an exception. For the past two years, the United States has been sending voluntarily $1.2 billion Total for the organization – about 15 percent of the total annual funding. Trump can get the United States to stop paying its membership fees, but he cannot unilaterally decide to cut off all of the funding — Congress would have to do that. “There’s still a battle to be fought, if you will,” Wiens said.
A senior Grist official confirmed that WHO’s climate and health research programs, which comprise a relatively small share of the organization’s overall expenditures, are not primarily funded with US dollars and will continue to operate regardless of Trump’s withdrawal.
But America’s influence on international public health infrastructure goes beyond its financial support for the World Health Organization.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has worked for decades to understand and mitigate disease outbreaks as they emerge around the world and conduct research on malaria, HIV, and Lyme disease—a vector-borne disease that is more common in the United States—among the United States—among the United States. – Other threats to human health. Countless relationships have been formed between staff at federal health agencies in the United States and from headquarters and field offices around the world. These public officials are in regular contact with each other about issues ranging from annual flu strains to bird flu outbreaks to the threat of swine flu. Malaria at high altitudes Due to high temperatures.
Every four years, federal agencies approve funding for… Collaborative centers At universities in the United States that conduct research with those on public health issues such as nutrition and infectious diseases. If the Trump White House declines to renew those centers, Wiens said, it would lead to academic collaboration on future pandemics, the biowarfare threat, climate change, and other issues that fall under the umbrella of global health security. As of now, it is not clear to what extent these partnerships will be threatened by Trump’s withdrawal. “All we know is that it will make work more difficult,” Wiens said.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s directive to halt external communications at health agencies across the federal government until at least February 1 means health advisories, weekly disease surveillance statements, social media, press releases, and other forms of outreach will not reach Americans unless “They” were approved by the political appointee. Trump similarly directed some agencies to cease outside contacts during his first term, and federal health officials She told the Washington Post These new boundaries may not last a few weeks with the Trump team getting organized. However, there is no good time for the nation’s public health systems to go dark, because time-sensitive notifications about food-borne disease outbreaks and persistent threats such as bird flu, a rapidly evolving threat With the potential of the pandemiccan save lives.
“It is not unusual for a new administration to want to centralize communication,” he said. She told the New York Times Wednesday. “It is unusual to stop all communication from an agency where one of its important responsibilities is to keep the public informed.”
