We should probably be more worried about wildfires and measles than we have been so far.
Last week, the Centers For Disease Control reported 222 cases of measles in 12 states, including Georgia. That doesn’t sound like a big number, but it’s nearly as many cases as there were in all of 2024 and has so far claimed the lives of two people.
The center of the outbreak is West Texas and New Mexico, which one local official called “a public health shortage area,” a description that would fit a lot of rural Georgia.
The CDC has a unit called the Epidemic Intelligence Service, nicknamed the “disease detectives,” which states can request to investigate a local problem and provide short-term assistance. Last week, as questions swirled around Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s earlier comments seeming to minimize the importance of the outbreak, the CDC sent an EIS unit to Texas.
In the first round of DOGE layoffs, some 50 first-year EIS employees were cut, which means the people who would be getting sent to deal with disease outbreaks like this a few years from now are gone. The news this week that all HHS employees are being offered $25,000 to leave should make us worry more about epidemics in the future.
There’s a term, the Wildland-Urban Interface, which describes areas where human development and wildlife vegetation are rapidly growing closer to each other. This, along with continuing drought, explains the increase in wildfires in places we’ve not seen them before, from Myrtle Beach, S.C. to Long Island, New York.
Georgia, the Carolinas, and Florida have seen some of the biggest increases in wildfires this year. Forecasters — of which there soon may not be as many — are predicting the rest of the major fires in the Southwest will also increase as the year goes on. Meanwhile, damages from the Los Angeles fires, which began this year’s fire season, have been projected at $164 billion.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose department includes the U.S. Forest Service, last week surveyed an area in North Carolina where damage from the fires overlaps the area devastated by Hurricane Helene last year. Trees knocked down by Helene have become tinder for the fires, which have burned more than 2,000 acres in North Carolina this year.
Rollins praised Forest Service personnel’s prompt response to the wildfires. She acknowledged that “mistakes have been made” in the DOGE reductions but said she supported the effort.
According to Forbes, the mood among federal firefighters isn’t nearly as upbeat. “Uncertainty is at an all-time high. Morale is at an all-time low,” one of them told the magazine, speaking off the record out of fear of being fired.
An early attempt by DOGE to get directly involved in wildfire management when two young staffers flew to California and attempted to take over a pumping station, which turned out not to be connected with the water system in Los Angeles.
Both contagious diseases and wildfires have been treated as shared responsibilities of state and local governments. The federal disease detectives don’t go into a state unless they’re invited, and in situations like the current one, they’re generally welcomed.
With the massive cuts taking place in the federal workforce, we can expect that state agencies will be expected to step up to take their place during times of emergency. That raises a lot of questions about how health and safety issues will be handled in the future.
Having witnessed the campaign of retribution currently being waged against federal employees, would any state health official have the guts to call for a quarantine or even a vaccination campaign in the face of a dangerous epidemic?
In states that have specifically prohibited local governments from considering climate change as a factor in zoning, what’s going to happen when those Wildlife-Urban Interfaces start catching fire?
What happens when a fire starts in one state and spreads to another, or a measles outbreak crosses state lines? With no referees looking over their shoulders, will the state start pointing fingers when they should be working to save each other? That possibility doesn’t sound nearly as far-fetched as it would have a month or so ago.
