Measles update: Who needs research?

I’m very sorry to say that we once again have to talk about RFK Jr and his continued quest to make us all sick and stupid.

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s motto is “ Make America Healthy Again,” but government cuts could make it harder to know if that’s happening.

More than a dozen data-gathering programs that track deaths and disease appear to have been eliminated in the tornado of layoffs and proposed budget cuts rolled out in the Trump administration’s first 100 days.

The Associated Press examined draft and final budget proposals and spoke to more than a dozen current and former federal employees to determine the scope of the cuts to programs tracking basic facts about Americans’ health.

Among those terminated at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were experts tracking abortions, pregnancies, job-related injuries, lead poisonings, sexual violence and youth smoking, the AP found.

“If you don’t have staff, the program is gone,” said Patrick Breysse, who used to oversee the CDC’s environmental health programs.

Federal officials have not given a public accounting of specific surveillance programs that are being eliminated.

Instead, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman pointed the AP to a Trump administration budget proposal released Friday. It lacked specifics, but proposes to cut the CDC’s core budget by more than half and vows to focus CDC surveillance only on emerging and infectious diseases.

Kennedy has said some of the CDC’s other work will be moved to a yet-to-be-created agency, the Administration for a Healthy America. He also has said that the cuts are designed to get rid of waste at a department that has seen its budget grow in recent years.

“Unfortunately, this extra spending and staff has not improved our nation’s health as a country,” Kennedy wrote last month in The New York Post. “Instead, it has only created more waste, administrative bloat and duplication.”

Yet some health experts say the eliminated programs are not duplicative, and erasing them will leave Americans in the dark.

“If the U.S. is interested in making itself healthier again, how is it going to know, if it cancels the programs that helps us understand these diseases?” said Graham Mooney, a Johns Hopkins University public health historian.

It’s a good question, but one that RFK Jr’s brain worm was unable to answer. Click over to read about the many specific programs that are being trashed.

There is of course a lawsuit over this.

Attorneys general in 19 states and Washington, D.C., are challenging cuts to the U.S. Health and Human Services agency, saying the Trump administration’s massive restructuring has destroyed life-saving programs and left states to pick up the bill for mounting health crises.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Rhode Island on Monday, New York Attorney General Letitia James said. The attorneys general from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia signed onto the complaint.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. restructured the agency in March, eliminating more than 10,000 employees and collapsing 28 agencies under the sprawling HHS umbrella into 15, the attorneys general said. An additional 10,000 employees had already been let go by President Donald Trump’s administration, according to the lawsuit, and combined the cuts stripped 25% of the HHS workforce.

“In its first three months, Secretary Kennedy and this administration deprived HHS of the resources necessary to do its job,” the attorneys general wrote.

Kennedy has said he is seeking to streamline the nation’s public health agencies and reduce redundancies across them with the layoffs. The cuts were made as part of a directive the administration has dubbed, “ Make America Healthy Again.”

HHS is one of the government’s costliest federal agencies, with an annual budget of about $1.7 trillion that is mostly spent on health care coverage for millions of people enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid.

James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the restructuring a “sweeping and unlawful assault” that would endanger lives.

“This is not government reform. This is not efficiency,” James said during a press conference Monday.

The good news is that given the overall track record, it’s likely that the plaintiffs will win. The bad news is that these things take time and it’s really hard to put broken things back together. It’s the best we can do for now.

I should note that all of this is also intimately tied in with the Trump attacks on higher education. Josh Marshall puts it together. I’ll give you the closing paragraph and encourage you to read the whole thing:

This is how the Trump White House is currently strangling billions in cancer, Alzheimers and other disease and cure research in real time while mostly managing to do it with near perfect radio silence.

None of this is directly measles-related, but so what? It’s all bad, now and for the future, and it’s all of a piece.

With that out of the way, here’s your midweek update.

The measles outbreak that started in the South Plains region of Texas surpassed 700 cases on Tuesday, according to health officials.

The latest update from the Texas Department of State Health Services shows the state has seen 702 cases of measles since the outbreak began spreading in late January. The outbreak, which has also spread to New Mexico and Oklahoma, is the largest in the United States since measles was declared eliminated in the country in 2000.

[…]

The latest DSHS update includes 19 new cases since the agency’s last update on Friday.

Seven of those cases are in Gaines County, which has now reported 403 cases during the outbreak. The small county along the New Mexico border has seen more than 57% of all cases associated with the outbreak.

El Paso County reported six new cases. The county has now reported 60 cases associated with the outbreak, the second-highest total of any Texas county.

Six counties — Hale, Lamar, Lubbock, Parmer, Terry and Yoakum — each reported one new case on Tuesday.

Of the 702 cases in Texas, 207 have been in children younger than 5 years old and 255 have been in children and teens between 5 and 17, according to the DSHS.

Thirty cases, or about 4% of the total, have been in people who received at least one dose of MMR vaccine prior to an infection. One dose of the vaccine is 93% effective at preventing an infection, and two doses are 97% effective, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Is the outbreak slowing down? Your Local Epidemiologist suggests it might be, based on no hospitalized children in West Texas for measles in the latest report, among other things. It may be that the curve is bending, but we’re still easily within range of the “fifty cases a week” metric, and like me she’s worried about El Paso. Give it another week and we’ll see where we are.

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