The Wall Street Journal published an article a few days ago that CDC was scaling back its overseas work. I didn’t pay much attention at first – CDC and USAID share funding and responsibility for US participation in the Global Health Security Agenda, and I figured it was just CDC losing in the interagency funding process. USAID, I thought, would start funding the activities CDC backed off from.

But no, this is the post-2016 world. USAID’s funding for global health security is decreasing too.

Well, the third US partner in global health security is the Department of Defense. They’ve historically had the lion’s share of global health security money. Perhaps a military-loving administration has simply moved all the global health security money over there?

Nope, that budget is getting cut too. Apparently we’re just going with the “Screw it, Ebola is really far away; Zika, what Zika?” approach to combating infectious diseases. Sigh.

(if you want actual numbers and serious analysis, the Kaiser Family Foundation has a great brief on this. The numbers are from November but to my knowledge have not substantially changed.)

In other news, I sent out my first batch of postcards yesterday. Definitely my best crazy idea so far. Most of the other ideas have been in the personal/family category and heavy on the failure, although I do now own yet another domain name.