While we're all fascinated by the carnival of fools in Washington, there are in the world several terrifying outbreaks of epidemic disease. In the bombed and battered country of Yemen, for example, there is a massive and spreading cholera outbreak with a body count already sailing into triple digits. From The Guardian:

Sana'a is controlled by the armed Houthi movement, which is aligned with Iran and fighting a western-backed, Saudi-led coalition. More than 10,000 people have been killed and millions displaced in more than two years of war, which has also destroyed much of the country's infrastructure. Only a few medical facilities are still functioning and two-thirds of the population are without access to safe drinking water, the United Nations has said. "What is happening today exceeds the capabilities of any healthy health system, so how can we [cope] when we are in these difficult and complicated conditions?" Saba quoted the Houthi-run administration's health minister Mohammed Salem bin Hafeedh as saying. After meeting in Sana'a with UN humanitarian coordinator Jamie McGoldrick and other international officials, the minister called on humanitarian organisations and aid donors to help it avert an "unprecedented disaster".

Yemen also is experiencing famine at the same time. Meanwhile, in Brazil, yellow fever has come roaring back. From The New York Times:

Now, with Brazil facing an unusually large outbreak of yellow fever — there are 715 confirmed cases, more than 820 suspected cases and 240 confirmed deaths — another global health crisis looms. So far, the outbreaks have largely been confined to sparsely populated jungle areas. There is serious concern, however, that if the virus starts spreading in a major city, health authorities will be ill equipped to contain it. Rio de Janeiro, for one, is aggressively vaccinating its citizens in hopes of inoculating 12 million by the end of the year. Yellow fever already kills upward of 30,000 people a year worldwide, though in 2013 as many as 60,000 might have died from the disease. With the threat of yellow fever returning to regions where it was once expunged, that number could rise significantly. What is particularly worrying is the possibility of yellow fever taking hold in previously unaffected parts of the world like Asia. The combination of Aedes aegypti being prevalent there and about 1.8 billion unvaccinated people living in densely populated parts of that continent makes for a potential disaster.

And here, health authorities are still on the lookout for another Zika outbreak.

I mention all of this not only to try and catch us all up on stories that could explode at any moment, but also because it's important to look at these stories in the context of who it is that happens to be in the White House at the moment. So far, almost all of the crises in this presidency have been self-inflicted. But, sooner or later, an actual crisis is going to come out of the blue and it's just as likely to be a public-health crisis as any other kind. The president*'s track record in these situations is not promising. In 2014, during the Ebola frenzy, he leaped into it with both feet, which was a considerable feat, considering both of his feet were in his mouth. From Mother Jones:

Insofar as Trump expresses a coherent political philosophy, those expressions can be found not in policy papers or major addresses, but in his tweets. When examining Trump's tweets on the Ebola outbreak, the main features of his approach are plainly evident. It's all right there: The shallowness, willful ignorance, mean-spiritedness, and empty boasting infuse every 140-character burst. And Trump's views on the issue received massive media attention. His tweets were written up everywhere from Breitbart to USA Today to Mother Jones. He elaborated on them in his regular Fox News appearances.

To this rich history we can add the fact that, in his draconian proposed budget, Trump proposed to savage the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. Because the president* is a boob, the Democratic minority managed to outmaneuver him on these issues completely, at least for the moment. But there's nothing in the record that says he knows any more about cholera or yellow fever than he knows about anything else. Just thought I'd lighten up your day a little.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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