Conservatives Hope You Get Sick

• Wired interview with the Director of U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  

  [TRF:] [...] For instance, here’s what we’re responding to right now: An outbreak of Legionella in a residential facility in Alabama. An outbreak of tuberculosis in another state. An investigation of a fatal case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever on an American Indian Reservation in Arizona where we’ve been working for two years to control that disease. A serious healthcare-associated infection outbreak in Baltimore. A cluster of infants who have been dying, or getting severely ill, in another part of the country. A cluster of meningitis in a university in the northeast that is going to require a very complicated response. An outbreak of hepatitis B in healthcare.
  
  ‘For every day of government shutdown, about one million emails at CDC go unread.’
  Every day in this country, there are births and deaths and hospitalizations and surgical procedures and emergency department visits and infections, and HIV and TB, and people who get sick from contaminated foods. For every day that goes by, there’s a less intensive investigation, less effective prevention of situations like this. If I had to use one phrase to describe what’s happening: This is a self-inflicted wound.

• Aedes aegypti found in California (vector for yellow fever, dengue fever and West Nile virus).
• Antibiotic-resistant salmonella.
• And 

  Two Colorado cantaloupe farmers plan to plead guilty under a deal with federal prosecutors in connection with the 2011 listeria outbreak that killed 33 people in the nation's deadliest case of foodborne illness in a quarter century.
  
  Eric and Ryan Jensen were charged last month with introducing adulterated food into interstate commerce.

  Because of course that would never happen.

But apparently the CDC was not essential.

Infection control has a liberal bias.