EBOLA ACTIVISM

In addition to keeping yourself and your loved ones germ‑free, you can take a larger role to spread knowledge about Ebola. Here are a few suggestions:

• Work to raise Ebola awareness in your area.

• Get support from your local politicians to help further awareness on the local, state, and national levels.

• Start a committee to establish guidelines for your local hospital to follow. Work with the hospital to get the systems in place.

• Donate money to a foundation (or create one) to help aid Ebola research and eradication. Recently, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced plans to donate $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation to help fight Ebola. Zuckerberg stated, “The Ebola epidemic is at a critical turning point… . It is spreading very quickly and projections suggest it could infect one million people or more over the next several months if not addressed. We need to get Ebola under control in the near term so that it doesn’t spread further and become a long term global health crisis that we end up fighting for decades at a large scale, like HIV or polio.”

Over the past decade, funding for initiatives like this has been cut dramatically. Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, reports that “NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here.’ Frankly, if we had not gone through our ten‑year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”

NIH’s budget hasn’t moved since 2004, when it was $28.03 billion–in 2013, it was $29.31 billion. Meanwhile, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ budget has fallen from $4.30 billion (2004) to $4.25 billion (2013). With inflation in account, that’s a lot less money spent on protecting us from epidemic disease.

Instead, government has focused the CDC on other priorities, including community transformation. The CDC project on community transformation has received roughly three times the funding than the project to protect against infectious diseases. The program funds programs like “increasing access to healthy foods by supporting local farmers and developing neighborhood grocery stores” or “promoting improvements in sidewalks and street lighting to make it safe and easy for people to walk and ride bikes.” Bike lanes and farmer’s markets are laudable enterprises for any community, but they will do little to stem an outbreak of influenza, anthrax, or Ebola.

Don’t think that I consider community transformation projects frivolous; for the most part, they’re not. I believe, however, that they might be better funded by states, municipalities, or private charities. Public health and safety is a better area for the federal government to spend resources. Let your local leadership know if this is how you feel.

TIP

Over the past decade, funding for NIH initiatives have been cut dramatically. There is not much money being spent to protect us from epidemic disease.