Trump cuts damage global efforts to track diseases, prevent outbreaks
Disease surveillance programs worldwide are suddenly in limbo
A project to track and contain menacing animal viruses across seven countries, from avian influenza in poultry to Lassa virus in rodents, ended with a single email. In late January, Jonathon Gass, an epidemiologist and virologist at Tufts University, was about to leave for Bangladesh to close out an effort to monitor and combat avian influenza, when the emailed letter arrived from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), ordering an immediate halt to work on the $100 million STOP Spillover project. Gass, a co-deputy director of the project, stayed in Massachusetts and started to call staff around the world to tell them to drop everything. One colleague monitoring Lassa virus in Liberia was driving to a field site. “I had to tell him that he needed to turn the car around, come back, and book a plane ticket home,” Gass says.
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Trump order could wipe out federal support for U.S. science museums
Institute of Museum and Library Services now run by Department of Labor as part of proposed dismantling
Pinedale, Wyoming, only has 2034 residents. But no town is too small for the traveling FlexCart operated by the Science Zone, a modest science museum serving residents of the most rural state in the continental United States.
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