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CDC Researchers are being forced to skip a key conference on infectious disease this week due to the government shutdown, missing out on the high-level discussion just days after a surge in measles and whooping cough in the US.
IDWeek, the nation’s largest annual meeting of infectious disease experts, is the premier venue for experts to trade information about the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of bird flu, superbugs and other threats. hivamong many other topics.
CDC typically sends multiple researchers and outbreak investigators. But of the hundreds of speakers listed in the printed program of the four-day conference, only about 10 were identified as CDC scientists. And even that small number did not appear.
The main reason is the government shutdown that started from October 1. Federal scientists are not being paid and conference attendance is postponed unless they are funded outside the annual government budget.
Problems were apparent long before the shutdown
The Infectious Disease Society of America and its conference partners were selected atlantawhere the CDC is located, as its host more than a year ago.
Organizer Dr. Yohei Doi said he was excited to have the meeting at the “Center for Public Health” and that CDC officials agreed to be heavily involved in the planning. University of Pittsburgh The researcher who helped organize the meeting.
But immediately after the President donald trumpAt the inauguration, an immediate, albeit temporary, moratorium was placed on CDC communications and participation in medical meetings. This was followed by layoffs and research funding cuts.
“As things started to evolve, they said they would no longer be able to participate,” Doi said of the CDC speakers.
danger of diseases looms
CDC’s absence comes when infectious disease experts should be in high demand, partly because the worst pandemic in a century occurred just a few years ago. Measles and whooping cough are on the rise. And new threats are constantly emerging.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he wants the CDC to focus primarily on infectious diseases, although he was a leading voice in the antivaccine movement before Trump appointed him to lead the federal government’s health agencies.
CDC has already lost a quarter of its workforce through layoffs, buyouts, resignations and other actions. And the Trump administration is trying to fire hundreds of people, an effort that has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
It is “the most painful irony” to see these actions by the administration amid serious threats, said Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Minnesota.
Osterholm, who spoke at the conference Sunday, said he is joining with others to pick up the slack that the CDC has done.
He announced a new open-access publication called Public Health Alerts, which will offer the kind of reporting that was a staple of CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Separately, a collaboration of dozens of foundations will pool resources to finance some of the disease research work the government has stopped doing, Osterholm said.
“It’s not business as usual anymore, but that doesn’t mean we have to sit back and take it for granted,” Osterholm said.
Conference sponsors clash with Kennedy
HHS has discouraged federal collaboration with some medical organizations, including IDSA, and that’s probably had a chilling effect, said Dr. Debra Horry, who was CDC’s chief medical officer until she resigned in August in protest of changes at the agency.
HHS spokeswoman Emily Hilliard said the administration believes federal scientists should share their research and expertise with peers and the public, and conferences are scrutinized “to ensure compliance with ethics rules and the responsible use of taxpayer funds.”
Dr. Anna Youssef, a CDC infectious disease physician, told The Associated Press that she was invited to present findings about the long-term outcomes of COVID-19-infected children who develop a rare inflammatory condition. He said he was not allowed to attend this week’s conference, although a colleague from another organization was planning to share research.
Other CDC scientists ran into similar difficulties, he said, and it was unclear how many of them were able to find such a solution. This potentially means that some research findings will not be shared with researchers and practitioners who could use the information.
Yousuf is currently on leave due to the government shutdown and said she was not speaking in her official capacity.
“It seems to me that the goal of HHS is to prevent the dissemination of scientific information,” he said. “This is madness.”
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