CDC's top laboratory on STDs is shut by Trump administration

Summary

At a time when the world is down to a single drug that can reliably cure gonorrhea, the U.S. government has shuttered the country’s premier sexually transmitted diseases laboratory, leaving experts aghast and fearful about what lies ahead. The STD lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a leading player in global efforts to monitor for drug resistance in the bacteria that cause these diseases — was among the targets of major staff slashing at the CDC this past week. All 28 full-time employees of the lab were fired. STD clinicians and researchers were flummoxed, both because most of the other infectious diseases functions of the CDC were spared in this round of cuts, and because of the critical nature of the work the lab performed. Until the Trump administration announced the United States was withdrawing from the World Health Organization, the CDC lab was one of three international reference laboratories for STDs that worked with the WHO to conduct surveillance for infection rates and drug-resistance patterns and to recommend the best ways to treat these infections. The other two are in Australia and Sweden. A CDC white paper on antibiotic resistance released during the first Trump administration listed drug-resistant gonorrhea as one of five urgent threats facing the country. Antimicrobial resistance to that last drug that reliably works to cure gonorrhea, ceftriaxone, is rare but on the rise globally. “The loss of this lab is a huge deal to the American people,” said David C. Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, which represents state, city, and U.S. territorial STD prevention programs across the country. “Without that lab, we would have not been able to appropriately diagnose and monitor drug-resistant gonorrhea.” There has been no explanation from the Department of Health and Human Services, or its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., about why the STD lab was closed. When STAT asked the HHS press office about the c...