Bio-disaster hospital preparedness another victim of Republican budget cuts

[applegrove]

Bio-disaster hospital preparedness another victim of Republican budget cuts

by Joan McCarter at the Daily Kos

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/13/1336336/-Bio-disaster-hospital-preparedness-program-another-victim-of-Republican-budget-nbsp-cuts

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The National Institutes of Health funding has been cut. The Centers for Disease Control's funding has been cut. Without those cuts, the Director of the NIH says, "we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready." And without those cuts, the CDC would be in a much better position to prevent the disease from spreading in the U.S. So let's go for the trifecta and talk about cuts to the Hospital Preparedness Program, a state-federal cooperative administered by the Department of Health and Human Services.

That program does just what it says it does—prepares hospitals for pandemics. In 2003, the program was funded at $520 million. In 2013, its budget had been pared down to $358 million. Because of sequestration, its budget for both 2014 and 2015 is $255 million.


Officials at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness have warned that the funding shortfall has created a vulnerability. Dr. Irwin Redlener, who directs the center, said there are only four hospitals in the U.S. "at a very high level of readiness" to care for patients with potentially lethal diseases like Ebola.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, noted that any hospital with an isolation ward could treat an Ebola patient, since the disease is transmitted only through direct contact with bodily fluids or objects contaminated with the virus. "It's not so much a matter of facilities," he said.




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