Last week, the Centers For Disease Control reported 222 cases of measles in 12 states, including Georgia. That doesn’t sound like a big number, but it’s nearly as many cases as there were in all of 2024 and has so far claimed the lives of two people.
The center of the outbreak is West Texas and New Mexico, which one local official called “a public health shortage area,” a description that would fit a lot of rural Georgia.
The CDC has a unit called the Epidemic Intelligence Service, nicknamed the “disease detectives,” which states can request to investigate a local problem and provide short-term assistance. Last week, as questions swirled around Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s earlier comments seeming to minimize the importance of the outbreak, the CDC sent an EIS unit to Texas.
In the first round of DOGE layoffs, some 50 first-year EIS employees were cut, which means the people who would be getting sent to deal with disease outbreaks like this a few years from now are gone. The news this week that all HHS employees are being offered $25,000 to leave should make us worry more about epidemics in the future.
Both contagious diseases and wildfires have been treated as shared responsibilities of state and local governments. The federal disease detectives don’t go into a state unless they’re invited, and in situations like the current one, they’re generally welcomed.
With the massive cuts taking place in the federal workforce, we can expect that state agencies will be expected to step up to take their place during times of emergency. That raises a lot of questions about how health and safety issues will be handled in the future.
Having witnessed the campaign of retribution currently being waged against federal employees, would any state health official have the guts to call for a quarantine or even a vaccination campaign in the face of a dangerous epidemic?
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