I rhink Bush's tax cuts have created a fair weather economic situation. In other words, just so long as there are no storms or other natural disasters, no pandemics, no wars, no comets, etc, our budget is sufficient to create a 500 billion dollar yearly deficit (Bush said runnign deficits is OK).

This article in Feb/05 says Bush is cuttinf CDC. We know what happened when he gutted FEMA.

http://www.ajc.com/hp/content/auto/epaper/...b1316c00b4.html

CDC cuts could hurt bioterror effort
Bush '06 budget: De-emphasizing agency makes U.S. more vulnerable, health advocates say.
David Wahlberg, M.a.j. Mckenna - Staff
Sunday, February 6, 2005

Public health advocates warned Saturday that if President Bush's proposal to cut nearly $800 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention budget is approved by Congress, the nation will be more vulnerable to bioterrorism and avian influenza and less able to deal with the obesity epidemic.

CDC workers said the proposed 9 percent cut in 2006 spending would further rattle an agency dealing with reorganization and a surge of retirements, including some disgruntled top scientists.

Bush's spending plan will not be released until Monday, but some details were reported Saturday by The New York Times, which obtained copies of the spending documents. The newspaper said the CDC's budget would be reduced to $6.9 billion, including substantial cuts in bioterrorism programs and in efforts to combat obesity and chronic diseases.

Critics said the cuts, including a 12.6 percent reduction in state and local bioterrorism programs run by the CDC, would undermine efforts to improve the nation's public health readiness. Bioterror funding was significantly boosted in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorism and subsequent anthrax attacks.

"The threat of bioterrorism has not lessened," said Tara O'Toole, director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh. "To cut back is nonsensical. It calls into question whether or not we're serious about this."

Public health advocates generally praised the reported Bush plans to boost funding for community health centers, children's health insurance plans and the global AIDS effort.

While the proposed budget seeks $120 million --- likely research and vaccine development money --- to deal with a potential worldwide outbreak of influenza, some public health advocates said they were concerned because current funding is inadequate for disease surveillance and response.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, opposes the proposed loss to another CDC program --- nearly $60 million, or 6.5 percent, from the Public Health Service's chronic disease prevention and health promotion. The program targets heart disease and cancer, the country's top killers.

"If you want to make a dent in the leading expenditures for health, you need to support these programs," Benjamin said.

He also objected to the proposed elimination of a $131 million block grant to states by the CDC for prevention health services, used for everything from diabetes screening to controlling West Nile virus.

Those cuts, on top of lost bioterrorism funding and reductions in public health spending already made by many state governments, could deliver a major blow to a range of health programs, Benjamin said.

"It's a triple whammy for states," he said. "People will lose jobs within government and outside of government because of this."

Benjamin said he also was concerned about reports of a proposed $38 million increase for sexual abstinence programs, which would bring total funding for abstinence-only education to $192.5 million, a 50 percent increase since 2004.

Many public health officials prefer comprehensive sex education, which includes discussion of condoms and other birth control measures. "We should follow the science," he said. "It says a balanced approach is the best approach."

The proposed budget cuts were no surprise to Georgia lawmakers or congressional aides, who said the administration has consistently proposed such cuts in recent years, only to be partly rebuffed by Congress.

"In this budget process for the last three or four years, the initial budget for the CDC was short --- whether it was the operating budget or the capital budget or both --- and we always came out fine in the end," said U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Republican from Marietta.

"We may have a fight ahead of us, but the CDC should come out fine in the end," Isakson said.

Angie Lundberg, a spokeswoman for U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, agreed. "We look at the budget as the starting point," she said.

Chambliss, a Republican from Moultrie, wrote White House budget officials in December, urging them to spare CDC funding, particularly for construction projects. He described existing agency facilities as being in a "state of extreme disrepair."

"In the event of a biological or chemical attack, Americans look to the CDC for help, research, cures and answers," Chambliss wrote to Josh Bolten, Bush's top budget official. "It is critical that we provide them with modern equipment and facilities to continue improving our public health preparedness."

Staff at the CDC, who declined to speak on the record, said Saturday that rumors of budget cuts have circulated for weeks. The proposed cutbacks would be demoralizing, staff members said, because they would follow cuts made last year --- including those not specified by Congress but imposed internally by CDC's ongoing reorganization.

Staff members said their colleagues have been disturbed by recent departures at the agency. In the past 18 months, the CDC has lost a number of long-serving staff in high-profile positions to retirement, including some who left years before their mandatory retirement deadline. The directorships of six of the CDC's 12 major centers are vacant, along with two new directorships created by the reorganization.

Public health spending has increased considerably since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, but advocates say many more improvements are needed. A December report by Trust for America's Health said that two-thirds of the states met six or fewer of the 10 indicators of public health preparedness.

Few states are ready for bioterror threats in the form of chemical or radiological agents, Shelley Hearne, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit organization, said Saturday. More progress has been made against biological threats, but there still aren't enough people who know how to test for germs such as anthrax or bubonic plague, she said.

Bioterrorism "is still probably the weakest link in homeland security," she said. "There are still enormous gaps out there."

--- Staff writer Bob Kemper contributed to this article.

This applies to this thread as well as the other bird flu threads.... See hilited text.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/05/bush.reax/index.html

Bush military bird flu role slammed

Wednesday, October 5, 2005; Posted: 9:42 a.m. EDT (13:42 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A call by President George W. Bush for Congress to give him the power to use the military in law enforcement roles in the event of a bird flu pandemic has been criticized as akin to introducing martial law.

Bush said aggressive action would be needed to prevent a potentially disastrous U.S. outbreak of the disease that is sweeping through Asian poultry and which experts fear could mutate to pass between humans.

Such a deadly event would raise difficult questions, such as how a quarantine might be enforced, the president said.

"I'm concerned about what an avian flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world," he told reporters during a Rose Garden news conference on Tuesday.

"One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move," he said. "So that's why I put it on the table. I think it's an important debate for Congress to have."

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 bans the military from participating in police-type activity on U.S. soil.

But Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and director of its National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told The Associated Press the president's suggestion was dangerous.

Giving the military a law enforcement role would be an "extraordinarily Draconian measure" that would be unnecessary if the nation had built the capability for rapid vaccine production, ensured a large supply of anti-virals like Tamiflu and not allowed the degradation of the public health system.

"The translation of this is martial law in the United States," Redlener said.

And Gene Healy, a senior editor at the conservative Cato Institute, said Bush would risk undermining "a fundamental principle of American law" by tinkering with the act, which does not hinder the military's ability to respond to a crisis.

"What it does is set a high bar for the use of federal troops in a policing role," he wrote in a commentary on the group's Web site. "That reflects America's traditional distrust of using standing armies to enforce order at home, a distrust that's well-justified."

Healy said soldiers are not trained as police officers, and putting them in a civilian law enforcement role "can result in serious collateral damage to American life and liberty."

People who catch the worst strain of avian flu can die of viral pneumonia and acute respiratory distress, according to mayoclinic.com.

The disease has killed tens of millions of birds in Asia.

Last week, the U.N.'s health agency, the World Health Organization, sought to ease fears that the disease could kill as many as 150 million people worldwide.

"We're not going to know how lethal the next pandemic is going to be until the pandemic begins," WHO influenza spokesman Dick Thompson said, according to The Associated Press.

The consequences of an outbreak in the United States need to be addressed before catastrophe strikes, Bush said.

The president said he saw things differently than he did as governor of Texas. "I didn't want the president telling me how to be the commander in chief of the Texas Guard," he said.

"But Congress needs to take a look at circumstances that may need to vest the capacity of the president to move beyond that debate. And one such catastrophe or one such challenge could be an avian flu outbreak."

Should avian flu mutate and gain the ability to spread easily from human to human, world leaders and scientists would need rapid access to accurate information to be able to stem its spread, he said.

"We need to know, on a real-time basis, the facts, so the world's scientific community could analyze the facts," he said.

Bush said he had spoken to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about work towards a vaccine, but that means of prevention remained a distant hope.

"I take this issue very seriously," Bush said. "I'm not predicting an outbreak, but just suggesting to you we ought to be thinking about it, and we are."

Absent an effective vaccine, public health officials likely would try to stem the disease's spread by isolating people who had been exposed to it. Such a move could require the military, he said.

"I think the president ought to have all options on the table," Bush said, then corrected himself, "all assets on the table -- to be able to deal with something this significant."

Katrina lessons
Bush began discussing the possibility of changing the law banning the military from participating in police-type activity last month, in the aftermath of the government's sluggish response to civil unrest following Hurricane Katrina.

"I want there to be a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people," he told reporters September 26.

Last month, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush "wants to make sure that we learn the lessons from Hurricane Katrina," including the use of the military in "a severe, catastrophic-type event."

"The Department of Defense would assume the responsibility for the situation, and come in with an overwhelming amount of resources and assets, to help stabilize the situation," McClellan said.

The World Health Organization has reported 116 cases of avian flu in humans, all of them in Asia. More than half of them have been fatal, it said.

On Thursday, the Senate added $4 billion to a Pentagon spending bill to head off the threat of an outbreak of avian flu among humans. The bulk of the money -- $3 billion -- would be used to stockpile Tamiflu, an antiviral drug that has proved effective against the H5N1 virus -- the strain blamed for six deaths in Indonesia last week.

U.S. health agencies have about 2 million doses of Tamiflu, enough to treat about 1 percent of the population. The money added by the Senate would build that stockpile to cover about 50 percent of the population.

CNN's Deirdre Walsh contributed to this report.

No outrage?

Or do only wait until the effects of a bad decision are realized before we scream?

Now we know his true agenda. Reduce the CDC to just covering overhead and when they fall flat on their face if the pandemic comes, he can gloat over another goal accomplised.

If we have a strong enough military and no restrictions on how the president uses
it and a beefed up federal grants program for Faith-based organizations, we don't need anything else. Where's your faith and patriotism?

Well of course Bush is cutting the CDC. We are fighting the War on Bird Flu with the military, or did you miss that speech yesterday?

Ahhh.... at last one as cynical and sarcastic as myself, i greet you brother in spirit.

IF another spanish flu develops, nobody will have time to be outrage. the great flu pandemic killed of at LEAST 2½% of the worlds population in 1918-19, or between 25 and 70 million people (Due to the times, a lot of the deaths in less developed countries and developed too were registert as *Death by other courses* both for political and millitary reasons).
An equal virulent vira. would kill of more than 150 million people today in the span of less than a year, not least becourse the infra structure in even faster than it was at the time of the spanish flu.
Another important thing about the great flu pandemic, which make it so much different than any other viral calamity to have attacked our race, is the fact that the flu's vector of attack was both fast and hit the youngest and strongest among the grown up population, which is eksatkly the opposite of virulent diseases normal behavior (The old and small children is normally the first to go).
So let's hope we don't get to see anything equaly devestating in our lifetime, besides the loss of life, the world would be thrown into a deep and devastating depression whit untold misery to follow, since we are far more dependent on the funktion of the world wide infra structure, which would be thrown into a screeching halt and chaos if a new Spaniard should show it's head.

He's planning to do to the CDC what he did to FEMA, and we all know how that turned out. A little outbreak of bird flu, and the Social Security thingie will no longer be a problem. After all, the elderly are usually the first to go in an epidemic.

I hope the bird flu raptures Bush and all Republicans.