The DRC's soccer team plays Houston during an Ebola outbreak in their country. Texas created a hotline linking state health officials and UT doctors to handle calls about febrile illnesses, but experts warn the healthcare system may be overwhelmed, with CDC testing for certain diseases now stopped and federal expertise depleted.
Chapters
And then can I add one more thing that I think is really important and ties it back to kind of what's going on in the United States? So we are—
That was literally what I was about to ask you, but go for it.
Okay. So we are literally in like, in weeks inviting the entire world to the United States. And I'm in Texas where we have the most World Cup games. We are actively preparing. Argentina is playing here in Dallas. DRC is playing in Houston. And so people were already getting up in arms about hantavirus given that outbreak. So now we have this situation where we have— people are more aware of hantavirus. We have DRC playing in Houston and they're going— their fans are going to want to travel. And what's going to happen to our healthcare system?
Are their fans even allowed in the country?
I don't know what's go— I don't know, to be quite honest. I have no clue, but this is going to be a challenging situation and You know, for the state of Texas, I'm, I'm leading an initiative where we have set up an infectious disease consult line between the health department and the University of Texas, where we will basically have ID physicians taking calls from people anywhere out in Texas worried about infectious diseases. So now what's going to happen, we're going to get these calls and trying to figure out how to triage them. And I think one of two things is going to happen. One, they're going to get called on everything. And we're not going to have— know what to do. Fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. Everybody, I imagine you're working in the emergency room and you have a patient from DRC who comes in with fever, and Texas is still very, very traumatized by what happened in 2020. Dallas in particular. Now we have these, these things happening and we don't have the infrastructure to be able to manage this, right? CDC isn't even testing for Mpox anymore. What's going to happen is we're going to have an influx of people, people are going to get sick, we're going to be trying to figure out what to do, and we don't have the national government coordination to manage this. And it's, it's quite scary. And I keep saying that these things that are happening, they're tests for us, right? We have failed for hantavirus. Oh yeah, stress test failed. I suspect— And they're gonna fail again. Yeah, with Ebola. And you know, and the other thing is, is all these experts that we had in our federal government that had experience with these, they're no longer there. So it's also institutional knowledge, scientific knowledge that's gone. These people would work with our colleagues overseas. So what's gonna happen? I think this is actually in many ways much scarier than what happened in 2014 and in 2018 because of all those other dynamics going on right now.
