New York – The motto of the Secretary of Health of the United States Robert F. Kennedy is ” Make America healthy again“But government cuts could make it more difficult to know if that is happening.
More than a dozen data collection programs that track the deaths and the disease seem to have been eliminated in the layout of layoffs and the budget cuts proposed in the Trump administration. First 100 days.
Associated Press examined the proposals of the draft and final budget and spoke with more than a dozen current and previous federal employees to determine the scope of the cuts to the programs that track basic facts on the health of the Americans.
Among those finished in the centers for disease control and prevention were experts that track abortions, pregnancies, work -related injuries, lead poisoning, sexual violence and youth smoking, discovered the AP.
“If you don’t have staff, the program has gone,” said Patrick Breysse, who used to supervise CDC’s environmental health programs.
Federal officials have not given a public accounting of specific surveillance programs that are being eliminated.
On the other hand, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services of the United States pointed the AP to a Trump administration proposal published on Friday. It lacked details, but proposes to reduce the central budget of the CDC in more than half and votes to focus the surveillance of CDC only on emerging and infectious diseases.
Kennedy has said that some of the other works of the CDCs will be transferred to an agency yet to be created, the Administration for healthy America. He has also said that the cuts are designed to get rid of waste in an apartment that has seen their budget grow in recent years.
“Unfortunately, this additional expense and staff have not improved the health of our nation as a country.” Kennedy wrote last month In the New York Post. “On the other hand, it has only created more waste, administrative swelling and duplication.”
However, some health experts say that the eliminated programs are not duplicated, and erase will leave Americans in the dark.
“If the United States is interested in getting healthier again, how will you know, if you cancel the programs that help us understand these diseases?” Graham Mooney said public health historian at Johns Hopkins University.
The nation of the nation’s health surveillance is carried out by CDC National Health Statistics Center. Trusting birth and death certificates, generates information about birth rates, death trends and life expectancy. It also operates long -standing health surveys that provide basic data on obesity, asthma and other health problems.
The center has barely been touched in dismissals, and seems intact under current budget plans.
But many other efforts were attacked by the cuts, the AP found. Some examples:
He Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring Systemthat examines women throughout the country, lost all their staff, about 20 people.
It is the most complete data collection on health behaviors and results before, during and after delivery. Researchers have been using their data to investigate those of the Nation maternal mortality problem.
Recent layoffs also eliminated the personnel that collects data on fertilizations and abortions in vitro.
These cuts are especially surprising since President Donald Trump said he He wants to expand Access to IVF and that the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 Playbook for administration requested more abortion surveillance.
The CDC eliminated their leading poisoning program in children, which helped local health departments, through financing and experience, to investigate lead poisoning groups and find where the greatest risk is.
Lead poisoning in children generally comes from exposure to pieces of old paint, contaminated dust or drinking water that passes through lead pipes. But program staff also played an important role in the investigation of Apple apple contaminated with lead That affected 500 children.
Last year, Milwaukee’s health officials realized that peeling painting in aged local schools was endangering children. The city’s department of health began working with CDC to test tens of thousands of students. That assistance was arrested last month when the staff of the CDC program ended.
City officials are particularly concerned about losing experience to help them track the long -term effects.
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” said Mike Totoraitis, city health commissioner.
The staff of the 23 -year -old is also gone Environmental Public Health Monitoring Programthat had information about concerns that included possible cancer groups and weather -related diseases.
“The loss of this program will greatly reduce the ability to establish links between what could be in the environment and what health could be affected by that,” Breysse said.
In some cases, it is not a matter that employees leave, but the end of the specific types of data collection.
The transgender state is no longer being recorded in health monitoring systems, including those focused on violent deaths and risk behaviors by children.
Experts know that transgender people are more likely to be victims of violence, but now “it will be much more difficult to quantify to what extent they have a higher risk,” said Thomas Simon, the senior director recently retired from scientific programs in the CDC violence prevention division.
Personnel and financing seem to have remained intact for a collection of CDC data that provides information on homicides, suicides and accidental deaths that involve weapons.
But CDC violence prevention programs that acted on that information stopped. So, it was also the work in a system that collects hospital data on non -fatal injuries for causes such as shootings, accidents and drowning.
It also goes, apparently, they are the CDC National Intimate Couple Survey and Sexual Violence. The system is designed to collect information that is not found in the statistics of application of the law. Health officials see that work as important, because not all victims of sexual violence go to the police.
The National Institute for Occupational Health and Health, which tracks diseases and deaths related to work and makes recommendations on how to prevent them, He was destroyed For the cuts.
Kennedy has said that 20% of farewell people could be reinstated since the agency tries to correct errors.
That seemed to happen last month, when the American Federation of Government employees said that NIOSH workers involved in a black pulmonary disease program for coal miners had been temporarily returned.
But HHS officials did not answer questions about reinstatement. Micah Niemeier-Walsh of the EGE later said that the workers continued to have June termination dates and “we are concerned that this is to make the appearance that the programs still work, when they are not effectively.”
There has been no talk of saving some other NIOSH programs, including one focused on deaths in the workplace in oil and gas industries or a research project on how common is auditory loss in that industry.
HHS cuts eliminated The team of 17 members responsible for the National Survey on the use and health of drugs, one of the main ways in which the government measures drug use.
The CDC personnel who worked in the National youth tobacco survey.
There are other surveys that analyze the consumption of smoking and the drugs of young people, including “future monitoring” financed by the Government of the University of Michigan. School Survey.
But federal studies analyzed both adults and adolescents, and provided information on drug use by the abandonments of high school. CDC also deepened specific vapeo and tobacco products in the way that other surveys do not, and was a driver in the federal impulse to better regulate electronic cigarettes.
“There was an overlap between the surveys, but each one had their own specific approach that the others did not cover,” said Richard Miech, who leads Michigan’s study.
Work has been deranged to modernize data collection. That includes an update to a 22 -year system that helps local public health departments to track diseases and allows CDC to organize a national image.
Another victim was the Welfare and outbreak analysis centerthat tries to predict the trends of the disease.
The center, created during the COVID-19 pandemic, was working to forecast the current multiple measles outbreak. This prognosis has not been published in part due to the dismissals, according to two CDC officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss it and fear a remuneration for speaking with the press.
Trump has not always supported the generalized tests of health problems.
In the spring of 2020, when Covid-19 diagnoses were exploiting, the president worried that the nation’s ability to do more evidence was making the United States seem to have a problem worse than other countries. He called “a double -edged sword.”
Mooney, Johns Hopkins’s historian, wonders how interested is the new administration in informing health problems.
“You might think it is deliberate,” he said. “If you prevent people from knowing, they are less likely to worry.”
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The Department of Health and Sciences of Associated Press receives support from the Science and Educational Media Group of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
