Amid everything today I read this little gem

Full funding does not exist for the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pandemic response programs. The agency has faced severe budget cuts under President Donald Trump, including emergency funds and global health programs “Like so many others, Trump’s approach to protecting us from epidemics is a mess,”

Amid everything else, we have used budget cuts to compromise our best defense. Ok, like it or not this is what happened at Benghazi. You know, that “investigation” that never really looked at what caused the problem, just looked for blame? That is what happened, and if we do not pay attention to these viruses with pandemic possibilities, we are looking at having our country overrun by far deadlier threats.

Of course, we are building a useless wall.  Yeah, I said it. We are gutting essential programs in this “National emergency” so that we can create this senseless barricade for someone’s ego. If you don’t believe me? What kind of total jackass pouts and shuts down the whole fucking government to “get his way,” just like a toddler does. I will say this much that disease could give fuck less about a wall in its way, and this is a poor trade-off.

While I honestly am not trying to be political with my blog, I am going take a bit here and talk about why that cannot be the case with governmentally funded aspects of health care and prevention.  I am not impartial; my support is truly towards healthcare and this current administration is trying everything to derail both individual health care as well as disease protections. I am going to leave the healthcare piece alone and talk about prevention.

We ignore prevention.

First, with vaccines (yeah, I know, you are fucking it all tired of hearing about them).  They are the fucking cornerstone to keeping viruses and bacteria in check.  Yet we have no compulsory vaccination requirement at a national level.  Recently Britain announced some fantastic news.

HPV16 and 18, two of the most high-risk cancer-causing types of human papillomavirus, have been almost eliminated from young women in England thanks the introduction of a mass vaccination program in schools.

The latest statistics from Public Health England (PHE), released on January 22, suggest there has been a dramatic collapse of HPV16/18 infections in sexually active young women living in England.

Within a sample group of 584 women age 16 to 18, they detected zero HPV16/18 infections in 2018. By comparison, around 15 percent of young women were infected with these types of HPV in 2008, the year the vaccination program was introduced.

So virtually disappearing.  A REAL cause of cervical cancer is being eliminated right before our eyes.  Look at this from Australia

A woman dies of cervical cancer every 2 minutes. In 99.9 percent of cases, it is caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV). Thanks to a massive vaccination program targeting this common infection, HPV prevalence among Australian women aged 18 to 24 has dropped from 22.7 percent to just 1.5 percent over the last ten years, as reported in a new study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

With this significant prediction:

“We are forecasting that over the next 30-40 years, rates of cervical cancer will drop from around the current 930 cases a year in Australia to just a few,” lead author Professor Suzanne Garland, Director of the Centre for Women’s Infectious Diseases at the Royal Women’s Hospital, said in a statement.

What do we have? A fucking wall. How fucking stupid are we?  There are several reasons for not getting vaccines in this country, the main one? The safety of the vaccine. Wow, really?  We all fucking know why.  It is these fucking anti-vax dickheads that use made-up “science” to “convince” the ill-informed health consumer in America. The healthcare consumer that needs refuses to do any real research and relies on Google. Yeah the same ones that present to the clinic with abdominal pain that they are just sure is stomach cancer and who you can’t get a word in edgewise while they verbosely explain what they found on “insert site here” (as they shove a phone with the page in your face) and Dr. Oz said, and blah blah frickidy blah. The ones that will spend hours listening to Jenny McCarthy and others in the anti-vax movement for free while the person they are paying can’t get a word in edgewise.

Do you know that you are paying roughly $150 on average for an office visit and expecting me to treat you because of your google search? Wow, we are stupid, but hey, we are getting a wall.

Ok, I bitched about vaccines again.  Look, they are safe, and even though you hear all this bullshit? They are safe.  There is a chance that you may be allergic to a vaccine component, but these are rare.  The soreness, the site redness, the period of malaise post-vaccine?  All parts of your immune system responding to a weak or dead virus.  Imagine if you will that the disease itself is hundreds of times worse.

Vaccines need to be compulsory.  There are very few religions that frown on them, and honestly, public safety is more important than your religious beliefs. Britain and Australia have mandatory vaccinations that of course, are funded by the government which requires children and adults to have a history of certain vaccinations. Sorry kids; this is part of the prevention piece that we cut out of the budget to build what will eventually serve as our tombstone, a wall. A fucking wall.  Yes, a good portion of the HHS budget for health surveillance programs found itself diverted to the wall.

Providers need to step up education and learn to shut down these false science fucks before they start spouting their BS and offer ultimatums. Get the vaccines or, get the vaccines.

A vaccinated population will serve as a pretty robust first defense to pandemics. The next step is detection, surveillance, and response, which can be a very dry topic, one that I will get to in part two.

We need both; the second as much as the first.  We need to be able to monitor disease trends, investigate the symptoms, the transmission, and obtain samples in real-time.  We need to be prepared with a vaccine, take necessary quarantine precautions, and treating those with the disease in a safe environment to both them and the treatment team. We need this virtual wall around our country to stop diseases not some imagined threat.  We are failing at both, check the numbers. That is coming in the next piece, shortly.

Remember to be the kind of person your dog and your mom hope you are.