Over the weekend, the Trump administration fired several frontline responders to the ongoing H5N1 bird flu outbreak, then retreated shortly after, revoking their termination and attempting to revive key staff.
The firing letter was issued to an employee of the US Department of Agriculture. It is one of the agencies that continues to plague US dairy farms and devastated poultry businesses, and leads the federal response to outbreaks that affect more than 160 million birds and raise egg prices. . As the virus continues to spread, infectious disease experts fear it may spread among humans and evolve to cause more severe disease. So far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has documented it 68 human casesone of them was fatal.
Before Trump took office, health experts were able to stop transparency, inadequate, inadequate testing, and inadequate interference between dairy farms that were once thought to be included. For not doing so, the country’s response to H5N1 was criticised for its response to H5N1. up to now, A herd of 972 people from 17 states It has been infected since March last year, including 36 herds over the past 30 days.
A USDA spokesperson said in a statement to ARS Technica that the agency views response to the outbreak of H5N1 (Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI)) as a priority. So the agency protected several positions from staff cuts by granting exemptions sent to veterinarians, animal health technicians and others. However, not all were exempt, and some were fired.
“Some positions supporting HPAI were notified of their termination over the weekend, but we are working to quickly correct the situation and cancel those letters,” the spokesman said. Ta.
The USDA did not answer ARS Technica questions, the number of employees working on the outbreak, the number of those fired or the number of employees who have resurrected since the weekend.
The cuts are part of a larger, brutal effort by the Trump administration to cut federal agencies, and the cuts put other important governments and public services at risk. Recently, several institutions have been doing their best, including the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy. At the CDC, Cuts devastated the agency’s best disease detective program (Presentence Information Services), an agency that is important for responding to epidemics and other health emergencies.
