We have spent billions of dollars on bombing a rag-tag group of war lords inhabiting a dismal stretch of Iraqi desert who can’t even mount a drone air force and have no ocean port. The entire GOP nomination process virtually revolved around who is so manly they would spend more to bomb even harder. Total ISIS deaths in the US? A dozen or so most?
Meanwhile, about 20,000 Americans will die slow, gruesome deaths this year from a completely treatable disease:
New data released Wednesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that more Americans die now as a result of hepatitis C infection than from 60 other infectious diseases combined. Baby boomers, born between 1945 and 1965, are the hardest hit group. They account for 75 percent of all hepatitis C infections. Many of them have unknowingly been living with the infection for years and were most likely infected during medical procedures after World War II, when injection and blood transfusion technologies were not as safe as they are now, health officials said.
There’s two problems in reversing this: only about half of the estimated three to four million Americans who have the virus know they have it. Second, thanks to recent breakthroughs in medicine, Hep C can be treated, in most cases stopped dead in its tracks, and that recovery rate improves every year. But the best drugs to do that are new, they work in concert with other drugs, requiring expertise to administer, and in the US, that all adds up to expensive. Just not as expensive as blowing up sand with million dollar missiles.
The long-suffering Florida coral reef tract — the largest reef in the continental U.S. and third-largest barrier reef ecosystem in the world — may have bigger problems than anyone thought, according to new research from the University of Miami and Florida International University. Scientists have discovered that part of the reef is actually dissolving into the water, likely thanks to the effects of human-induced ocean acidification.
In brief, Trump said that NASA "has been one of the most important agencies in the United States government for most of my lifetime" and he wants it to remain that way. But in response to a question about whether the United States is spending the proper amount of money on NASA, he demurred: "I am not sure that is the right question. What we spend on NASA should be appropriate for what we are asking them to do. ... Our first priority is to restore a strong economic base to this country. Then, we can have a discussion about spending." He similarly deflected a question about whether sending humans to Mars should continue to be a goal. He strongly supported government-private sector partnerships in space.