On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to begin the process of withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization, the United Nations agency tasked with protecting global public health. A day later, his administration instructed federal health agencies to temporarily stop communicating with the public, a directive that applies to the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other agencies under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The pair of mandates will effectively silo U.S. public health agencies from their international counterparts and sever the American public, health providers, and research hubs from information about infectious diseases, budding epidemics, and even outbreaks of foodborne and waterborne illnesses.
“We live in a globalized world and diseases know no boundaries,” said Jonathan Patz, inaugural director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former lea... Read more
