St. Louis has been battered by two tornadoes for the past two months. A fire closed a new nursing home in Enterprise last month, Ala., Forces residents to evacuate. Cleveland struggled with a power outage while they are flooded with visitors for the NCAA ladies basketball final four.
In any case, local health officials played a key role in containing the consequences, helping hospitals, finding new houses for displaced residents and coordinating efforts with fire, police and other city departments.
The financing for this work, a total of around $ 735 million, comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the proposed budget of President Trump, the money was set to zero.
The proposed cut has left health officials more and more alerted, especially since it followed $ 12 billion in cuts in national and local health departments In March. Nineteen states and the district or columbia have sued to prevent the reductions.
“Man made and natural disasters does not depend on federal financing, but a reaction to save lives,” said Dr. Matifadza Hlatshwayo Davis, health director for St. Louis. (Dr. Davis has resigned but stays on until the city finds a replacement.)
The city deals with enormous zinc holes, is routinely confronted with flooding and is on an error line that endangers it in earthquakes. “We really trust this financing,” said Dr. Davis. Without this, “the entire population of St. Louis and his visitors would remain vulnerable.”
The Ministry of Health and Human Services has asked questions about the proposed budget to the Office of Management and Budget, which did not respond to a request for comments.
The funds are led to local health departments through the Cooperative Agreement of Public Health. The program was founded after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 to help the nation prepare for biological threats and other emergency situations.
The money helps civil servants to manage the consequences for public health of natural and man -caused disasters and to contain outbreaks of infectious diseases. It also pays the salaries of experienced officials who help prepare and reduce themselves, damage to public health.
The amounts vary per jurisdiction. St. Louis and Cleveland each receive around $ 250,000, which covers the salaries of three employees. Dallas, on the other hand, receives almost $ 2 million and pays the salaries of 17 employees.
“Especially at the local level you don’t have many buffers with these funds,” said Dr. Philip Huang, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services in Texas.
If the funds disappear, even large cities such as Dallas will be bumped during emergency situations. “The smaller the health department, the greater the impact is likely,” he said.
Dr. Davis said that her department receives less than 1 percent of St. Louis City budget. If the public health funds of the CDC were to be reduced, as the budget now proposes, neither Missouri nor the city will probably come up with the shortage, she said.
“Those people would lose their jobs immediately,” said Dr. Davis about the employees funded by the subsidy.
In Alabama, programs for readyness of emergency situations are fully funded by federal subsidies. Tornados, hurricanes and ice in the winter can all cause damage, which requires the intervention of health officials.
“Unfortunately we get quite a bit of practice with those activities because they are not so unusual,” said Dr. Scott Harris, state health officer at the Alabama Department of Public Health.
In many areas of law, civil servants relied on hundreds of volunteers to help with vaccinations against COVID and MPOX. But they still needed paid staff to coordinate those activities and train the volunteers, Dr. Huang.
“You can’t just let everyone show up and say,” Yes, I am a doctor, “he said. City officials check the references of volunteers, train and mobilize them for emergency situations if necessary.
In Cleveland, health officials who are responsible for preparedness in the middle of the night have received conversations from hospitals with possible cases of spleen or another infectious threat.
“This is an invisible workforce because they prepare for the worst scenarios – which often do not happen, thank goodness,” Dr. David Margolius, director of Health for Cleveland. “But it’s better to be prepared than being caught flat.”
Some officials have been worried since the elections that the Trump administration might not extend the programs when they ended. But they said they were not prepared for the money to be abruptly cut off, such as Other CDC finance flows have been.
If the congress carries out the cutbacks, “we should scramble to find out a situation for them,” he said, referring to the employees funded by the program. “It is simply completely unfair towards these teams and for residents in Cleveland who count on these services.”
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