{"id":5254,"date":"2025-04-23T09:44:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T09:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=5254"},"modified":"2025-04-23T09:44:00","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T09:44:00","slug":"fair-warning-there-wont-be-fair-warnings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=5254","title":{"rendered":"Fair Warning: There Won\u2019t Be Fair Warnings"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n<\/div>\n

By KIM BELLARD<\/p>\n

Perhaps you are the kind of person who acts as though that the food in the grocery store somehow magically appears, with no supply chain vulnerabilities along the way. You trust that the water that you drink and the air you breathe are just fine, with no worries about what might have gotten into them before getting to you. You figure that the odds of a tornado or a hurricane hitting your location are low, so there\u2019s no need for any early warning systems. You believe that you are healthy and don\u2019t have to worry about any pesky outbreaks or outright epidemics.<\/p>\n

Well, I worry about all those, and more. Say what you will about the federal government \u2013 and there\u2019s plenty of things it doesn\u2019t do well \u2013 it has, historically, served as the monitoring and warning system for these and other potential calamities. Now, under DOGE and the Trump Administration, many of those have been gutted or at least are at risk.<\/p>\n

But, at the end of the day, the thing at risk is us.<\/p>\n

Here is a not exhaustive list of examples:<\/p>\n

FDA: <\/strong>Although HHS Secretary Kennedy has vowed he will keep the thousands of inspectors who oversee food and drug safety, it has already suspended<\/a> a quality control program for its food testing laboratories, and has cut support staff<\/a> that, among other things, make arrangements for those inspectors to, you know, go inspect.\u00a0 Even before recent cuts, a 2024 GAO report<\/a> warned that the FDA was already critically short on inspectors.<\/p>\n

The FDA has already laid<\/a> off key personnel responsible for tracking bird flu, including virtually all of the leadership team in the Center for Veterinary Medicine\u2019s office of the director. Plus: \u201cThe food compliance officers and animal drug reviewers survived, but they have no one at the comms office to put out a safety alert, no admin staff to pay external labs to test products,\u201d one FDA official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told CBS News<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Even worse, drafts of the Trump budget proposal would further slash FDA budget, in part by moving \u201croutine\u201d food inspections to states.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

CDC<\/strong>: Oh, gosh, where to start? Cuts have shut down<\/a> the labs that help track things like outbreaks of hepatis and antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. We\u2019re having a hard time tracking the current measles outbreak that started in Texas and has now spread to over half the states<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The White House wants to encourage<\/a> more people to have babies, but has cut back<\/a> on a national surveillance program that collects detailed information about maternal behaviors and experiences to help states improve outcomes for mothers and babies. It helped, among other things, compare IVF clinics. \u201cWe\u2019ve been tracking this information for 38 years, and it\u2019s improved mothers\u2019 health and understanding of mothers\u2019 experiences,\u201d one of the statisticians let go told The Washington Post<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Office on Smoking and Health was effectively shuttered, in what one expert called<\/a> \u201cthe greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half century.\u201d\u00a0 CDC cuts will force<\/a> the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to stop collecting data on injuries that result from motor vehicle crashes, alcohol, adverse drug effects, aircraft incidents and work-related injuries.<\/p>\n

And if you\u2019re thinking of taking a cruise, you should know that the CDC\u2019s cruise ship inspections have all been laid off<\/a> \u2013 even though those positions are paid for by the cruise ship companies, not the federal government.<\/p>\n

EPA<\/strong>: Even though EPA head Lee Zeldin \u201cabsolutely\u201d guarantees Trump cuts won\u2019t hurt either people or the environment, the EPA has already announced<\/a> it will stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions, is shutting down all environmental justice offices and is ending related initiatives, \u201ca move that will impact how waste and recycling industries measure and track their environmental impact on neighboring communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The EPA has proposed<\/a> rolling back 31 key regulations, including ones that limit limiting harmful air pollution from cars and power plants; restrictions on the emission of mercury, a neurotoxin; and clean water protections for rivers and streams. Mr. Zeldin called it the \u201cgreatest day of deregulation our nation has seen\u201d and declared it a \u201cdagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.\u201d\u00a0 But, sure, it won\u2019t hurt anything.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

The EPA is also proposing<\/a> to loosen rules about coal ash storage and disposal. Most of us don\u2019t know much about coal ash but Environmental Health News<\/em> warns<\/a>: \u201cCoal ash is one of the largest industrial waste streams in the United States, containing toxic elements such as arsenic, mercury, and lead.\u201d Meanwhile, sister agency NIOSH has laid off<\/a> two-thirds of the staff who do black lung screening for coal miners, despite President Trump\u2019s purported love of coal miners.<\/p>\n

NIH<\/strong>: what\u2019s happening to the NIH deserves and article on its own, some of which I\u2019ve covered before<\/a>. The Trump Administration has frozen much research in its track, laid off a generation of young scientists, is severely cutting the amount of overhead funding that research universities have come to rely on, and is now using NIH grants for political extortion (take that, Columbia ad Harvard!).<\/p>\n

Its proposed budget would cut<\/a> NIH\u2019s budget nearly in half and consolidate its 27 agencies into eight. \u201cThis is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,\u201d Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

I could go on with other agencies, I would be remiss if I didn\u2019t note that cuts at the National Weather Service<\/a> and NOAA<\/a> will mean \u201cdegraded operations<\/a>\u201d that, mark my words, will come back to haunt us.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n

ProPublica<\/em> calls<\/a> the Administration\u2019s efforts as a \u201cwar on measurement\u201d:<\/p>\n

In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.<\/p>\n

It goes on to assert: \u201cLooked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The efforts are also a war on science. Climate change deniers and vaccine deniers are examples of how we\u2019ve entrusted our lives and health to people who reject well-established science in favor of their own personal beliefs, especially when that will make more money for big donors.<\/p>\n

This is a crisis. This is a catastrophe. This is our future, and we won\u2019t know some of it is happening until it is far too late to do anything about it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented <\/em>Tincture.io<\/em><\/a>, and now regular THCB contributor<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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