Pandemic Politics
Claudewell S. Thomas, MD, MPH, DLFAPA, is an established psychiatrist who is currently retired ,, He received his medical degree in 1956 at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and specializes in social psychiatry, public health psychiatry, and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Thomas was board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry... more
The city of Wuhan and its associated province were put under new political leadership as China threw new, substantial resources into the fight against COVID-19. Street spraying glycols and helicopter drops of defoliants and insecticides are allied with the national jingoistic assertion of pride and primacy. Newer methods of diagnosis namely ct scanning of liver, kidney, spleen, and lung are identifying infections that would have gotten by temperature and even early cumbersome lab tests. This, of course, has nearly doubled the number of cases and increased the number of earlier virus deaths by at least 1/3. But national fervor has shot up and it is China the nation-state carrying the world on its back as happenstance rather than intent.
In the USA, experts are quietly preparing for an explosion of the disease. Quarantine is viewed as rather ineffective against a disease that is protean in manifestation and transmission. Funding of Federal Public Health measures has gone down for such things as vaccine preparation and related research. A YALE public health symposium recently held, found itself confounded by the protean presentation of the evolving disease and unable to give specific instructions. Other Yale scientists in the School of Medicine (neurosciences and neurosurgery) have found that the creation of a chimeric (substantially genomically altered) Ebola virus can destroy glioma multiforme (brain cancer cells). Ebola a friend?
The current U.S. administration has reduced public health funding, has demanded the referral of foreign funding research sources going back 3 years for taxation purposes while announcing a public health emergency. The viral world's big three are on their way following COVID-19, I.e. SARS, MERS, and 1918 epidemic flu, EBOLA, and very possibly Measles.
