90-Second Read: How Prepared Are We for a Public-Health Emergency?

Dhruv Khullar on how the recent outbreaks of Hantavirus and Ebola expose the shortsightedness of the United States' retreat, under the Trump Administration, from its role as a global-health leader. Health authorities have sought to ease concerns about the outbreak. Hondius prepared to dock in Rotterdam, unloading the last of its crew, the World Health Organization declared an Ebola public-health emergency. What followed is well documented: a seventy-year-old man developed fever, diarrhea, and severe respiratory distress; he died of what turned out to be a Hantavirus infection.

Still, these outbreaks expose the shortsightedness of America's retreat from its role as a global-health leader. Bhattacharya and other officials have said that they are simply "restoring trust" in science, but polling suggests that faith in federal health agencies has plummeted. All this is properly understood as a grave and avoidable loss, for the country's standing and for the health and security of Americans. The piece argues that the country should largely stop trying to surveil for new pathogens, assess the risk they pose to humans, or develop vaccines and drugs to manage them.

Hantaviruses are usually found in rodent droppings, and they spread when someone inhales aerosolized particles or eats foods contaminated by them. At least seven hundred people have been infected and more than a hundred and seventy have died, mostly in a conflict-ridden region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On Tuesday, the W.H.O.'s director general said that he was "deeply concerned about the scale and speed" of the spread: by the time authorities learned of the outbreak, it was already unusually large, suggesting that many more people are probably infected or at risk. Neither Ebola nor Hantavirus is likely to unleash a pandemic: Ebola usually spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of a person showing symptoms, and Hantavirus hasn't proved itself capable of sustained community transmission.

There are no specific vaccines or treatments for the virus, which can cause a life-threatening condition known as Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome, whereby fluid pours out of the capillaries and into the lungs. According to a report in The New England Journal of Medicine, Hantavirus has previously been implicated in superspreader events. Federal officials have avoided using the word "quarantine," and the C.D.C.