By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2024-12-05 17:07:31 | Updated at 2024-12-22 11:44:40
2 weeks ago
A pro-lockdown virologist has warned that Donald Trump faces a torrent of infectious disease outbreaks when he takes office.
The comments from Dr Peter Hotez come as the Congo is put on 'maximum alert' after a mystery respiratory virus killed nearly 150 people, mostly teenagers.
UN health officials have been sent there to contain the outbreak and prevent it from being a global crisis.
Dr Hotez, a leading supporter of lockdowns and mask mandates during the Covid pandemic, warned there were at least nine infectious diseases currently spreading in the US that could cause another pandemic — in a plea to the Trump administration not to cut disease research funding.
Scientists are currently warning over a surge in bird flu cases in animals that are spilling into humans, as well as a resurgence in measles and whooping cough linked to falling vaccination rates.
In an interview with MSNBC news, Dr Hotez said: 'Here's the reason why we need to care about this stuff. We have some big picture stuff coming down the pipe.
'All that's going to come crashing down on January 21 on the Trump administration. We need a really really good team to be able to handle this.'
Dr Hortez's comments came hours before the Congolese Government's health minister warned the country was on 'maximum alert' over an outbreak of a disease 'of still unknown origin'.
Dr Peter Hotez, pictured above, was speaking on MSNBC warning of the dangers posed by
At least 376 people are already reported to have been infected by the illness that has hit Kwango province in the southwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Children between 16 and 19 years old are worst affected, with patients suffering from a flu-like illness with symptoms including a fever, headache, cough, difficulty breathing and anemia — or lack of red blood cells.
A World Health Organization team has been dispatched to the area to test samples and identify the cause of the illness. It is expected they will publish the results of the testing in the coming days.
Congo's health minister Roger Kamba warned in a press briefing today: 'We are on maximum alert. We consider this an epidemic that we must monitor as much as possible.
'We are more or less in the assertion that it is respiratory,' he added talking about how the disease may be spreading between people.
But added that this was still a 'hypothesis' and that the country was still awaiting the first results from the testing.
Officials initially suggested that 143 people had died from the mystery disease, although authorities appear to have reduced that number to 71 deaths.
These include 27 in people who died in the hospital and 44 people who died in the community.
Of the people who died in hospital, 10 died due to a lack of blood transfusions and 17 died as a result of respiratory problems — the health minister said.
Most of the cases were children in their late teens, aged between 15 and 18 years old according to the BBC.
Dr Annie Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked in Congo since 2002, told NBC News that diagnosing the illnesses may be complicated by underlying health issues in the local population, including malaria and malnutrition.
Pictured above is a doctor speaking to a patient about treating monkeypox in the South Kivu region in September this year
The above map shows the DRC, and highlights the province of Kwango where the outbreak has been recorded
'I think it's really important to be aware of what's happening, and I think it's also realy important not to panic until we have more information,' she said.
'It could be anything,' she added. 'It could be influenza, it could be Ebola, it could be measles. At this point, we really just don’t know.'
Dr Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious diseases expert and associate professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said that at this stage it was difficult to tell what was causing the outbreak because only general symptoms had been reported.
'We need more information,' she told DailyMail.com, 'the information that has been provided at present speaks of a number of diseases'.
Asked whether it could be monkeypox or Ebola, she said: 'In what they are reporting, we have not seen any reports of skin rash or skin abnormality — which would go with mpox.
'Typically, with viral hemorrhagic fever [like Ebola] you would hear reports of coughing or throwing up blood, and that has not been reported either.'
She added: 'The reports are concerning, but we need more data and more information about the symptoms they are seeing on the ground.'
Warning about emerging infectious disease outbreaks yesterday, Dr Hotez did not specifically mention the situation in the DRC during his call with MSNBC.
The above image is a screengrab from today's press conference in the DRC. It shows Roger Kamba, who heads up the country's department of health
He said: 'I'm really worried about [H5N1], it is all over wild birds in the western part of the United States, and going up to the north it is getting into the poultry.
'We're still seeing sporadic human cases, no human-to-human transmission yet, but that could happen. It's in the cattle, it's in the milk, and that's just the beginning.'
He continued: 'We have another major coronavirus likely brewing in Asia, we've had SARS-2 in 2002, Covid-19 in 2019, and we know these viruses are jumping from bats to people thousands of times a year.
'But there's still more. We know that we have a big problem with mosquito transmitted viruses all along the Gulf Coast where I am here in Texas, we're expecting Dengue and possibly Zika virus coming back or Oropuche virus, maybe even Yellow Fever.
'And then we have all this sharp rise in vaccine-preventable diseases going up becauase of, in part, the anti-vaccine activisim that's so prominent right now.
'We have a five-fold rise in pertussis cases, or whooping cough, over the last year, 15 measles outbreaks this year, we've got polio, that's been in the wastewater in New York state.'
He warned all these threats would come down on the Trump administration when it takes office on January 21, following inauguration day.
Trump has nominated vaccine-skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Junior to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, who still needs to be confirmed by the Senate.
He has already vowed to slash research spending on infectious diseases, and instead reapportion the funds to solving the nation's chronic disease epidemic — with rising cases of heart disaese, cancer, diabetes and obesity.
