The international agency, part of the United Nations, was founded in 1948 and includes 194 countries working together to fight the world’s toughest public health problems. It is the cornerstone of global health efforts, with a multinational staff fighting both communicable diseases—like COVID-19, Zika, and HIV—and chronic conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
WHO also works to fight malnutrition, deliver vaccines, and provide assistance and technical guidance to people in poor and battle-scarred regions of the world. Its biennial budget is $6.8 billion. The U.S. is among the largest donors.
Over the years, WHO has worked to eradicate smallpox, reduce worldwide polio cases by 99%, and greatly reduce the prevalence of malaria and trachoma, the world’s leading cause of blindness.
@[email protected] please add the required [Opinion] prefix in the title.
Sorry. Will do.
This will be an intense loss of resources for vaccine development going forward. Granted, scientists tend not to care about politics and share info on their own terms, for science, here’s hoping anyway should something on par with or worse than COVID come up.
The yearly flu shot, for example, is a world collaboration.
Think of it this way. Flu is forever mutating into new flu. If two flus meet in the night, there’s a high probability a third flu will be born. Pig flu can hook up with human flu. Human flu can hook up with chicken flu. And so it goes, an endless cycle of new flus, some better adapted to some species than others, until it just adapts.
So scientists collaborate every year to develop a flu vaccine that contain the top, say, 3 or so strains they predict will hit globally, and that mix is your flu vaccine, new and different every year. Most of the time, they get it right. Some years, a new bad player pops up and we have H1N1 or H5N1 making news.
I still don’t understand what Trump thinks he’s getting out of getting out of WHO.
And it’s looking increasingly likely the Bird Flu pandemic will move into humans. The US has already been lax on dealing with outbreaks in cattle. Trump has neutered the CDC and withdrawn from WHO.
The US is creating perfect conditions for a bird flu outbreak to originate in the US itself. It will he potluck how severe it is when it transfers into humans. Certainly the response will be hampered thanks to Trumps political choices so they won’t be able to contain it (which was already a low chance) but worse they have probably created conditions to accelerate its spread. It’ll likely spread further and faster than it would have done, affecting more people before vaccines can be made ready.
Trump Flu is coming.
Trump flu
I like this name. As soon as it turns into an epidemic in humans, we need to collectively call it Trump flu.
