CDC to Scale Back Work in Dozens of Foreign Countries Amid Funding Worries

Efforts to prevent infectious-disease epidemics and other health threats were funded mostly through a five-year supplemental package

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to scale back or discontinue its work to prevent infectious-disease epidemics and other health threats in 39 foreign countries because it expects funding for the work to end, the agency told employees.

.. The CDC currently works in 49 countries as part of an initiative called the global health security agenda, to prevent, detect and respond to dangerous infectious disease threats. It helps expand surveillance for new viruses and​ ​drug-resistant bacteria, modernize laboratories to detect dangerous pathogens​and train workers who respond to epidemics... The package included $582 million in funds to work with countries around the world after the Ebola crisis in 2014 and 2015. But that funding runs out at the end of fiscal 2019.
.. Public health leaders had said they hoped dollars for the work would eventually be added into the CDC’s core budget, after the epidemic delivered a wake-up call about the world’s lack of preparedness for deadly epidemics.
.. if its funding situation remains the same, it will have to narrow activities to 10 “priority countries” starting in October 2019
.. The 10 countries where global health security activities will remain are India, Thailand, Vietnam, Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Jordan and Guatemala
.. Other countries where the agency currently conducts global health security agenda activities include Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the world’s main hot spots for emerging infectious diseases and the site of the first Ebola outbreak in history; Pakistan; Indonesia; Haiti; and China
.. Those countries next on the priority list, after the top 10, are China, the DRC, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Sierra Leone

e Italy offers swimming lessons for refugees traumatized while crossing the Mediterranean

His swimming and rescue training aims to calm the trauma of a passage that has claimed the lives of at least 2,300 migrants and refugees this year.

.. And the Nautical Technical Institute in this gritty coastal city is trying to help emotionally scarred teenagers overcome their fear of the water in a region where most jobs are tied to the sea.

.. The program, which started in May, aims to teach basic first aid, and rescue and diving skills to the about two dozen teenage boys who live together in a dormitory at Basilica di Sant’Antonio in Messina. All of the boys are from sub-Saharan Africa. Some fled wars. Others are escaping poverty. All made the desolate journey through Libya, where many migrants are forced into labor, imprisoned and brutalized.

.. His mother is blind, he said, and he has no other family members. His plan is to become a professional soccer player in Italy and send money home.

 .. “People are racist here. If there’s a bench, and white people are sitting there, and you sit down, they’ll get up,” said Richard Amegah, 17, who made a 19-month journey from his native Ghana to Italy that started in 2014.
.. Unlike the largely Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees who streamed into Greece in 2015, many of the migrants on the Italian route are traveling northward for economic reasons.
.. This year, the principal sources of migrants have been Nigeria, Bangladesh, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Senegal and Mali, according to Italian Interior Ministry figures.
.. In the chaos, boys started falling off the slippery back of the boat. Among them was one of Hubert’s closest friends, Moussa, who drowned, he said.Now the lanky 17-year-old says he wants to become a lifesaver after fleeing his native Ivory Coast when he was 11 after rebels killed his parents.