When we cut funding to public health, we create a vicious cycle that goes against human decency and our quest for a balanced budget. Refusing to diagnose and treat the sick is inhumane and costs us more in the long term. Global health has phenomenal ROI.

I will use the example of the World’s deadliest infectious disease: tuberculosis. TB, though curable, killed 1.25 million people every year before we cut all foreign and domestic spending on it. By cutting off treatment, we sentence patients to a slow and painful death. Deprived of antibiotics, the disease within them becomes resistant to the medications that were working to treat it. It becomes more expensive and difficult to treat. Each year as the patient’s lungs slowly fill with blood and drown them, they infect another 10-15 people with this more resistant strain of the disease.

At this point of life-threatening illness, a person who previously worked, provided for their family, and paid taxes can now do none of this. Their children, if they are lucky, will be provided for at the state’s expense. If they are unlucky, their children will starve to death.

Infectious disease does not recognize international borders. It is illogical to assume that we can allow disease to flourish and spread across the world without increasing the burden here. Tuberculosis cases in the United States are currently on the rise.

If we had been trying to create a crisis of drug-resistant infectious disease and human suffering, we could not have done a better job. The recent cuts to USAID; The President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR); and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria were done in the worst possible way — cutting off all patients at once from their medication, regardless of where they lived, how resistant their illness was, or how sick they were. This was done without notice, without consulting doctors or professionals, and with a misguided belief that Americans would become healthier and wealthier by making our trade partners, allies, and fellow human beings sicker and poorer. All this, while violating Congress’s Constitutionally appointed role as holder of the purse.

Utahns are, by and large, Christians with a humanitarian spirit. Utah takes refugees. Many perform missionary service in faraway lands teaching about Jesus Christ, who told followers they would be judged by their treatment of the poor, the sick, and the stranger. Many Utahns believe the Constitution to be a divinely inspired document. To allow the executive branch to nullify funding enacted by Congress that saves millions of lives every year is to violate the Constitution, logic, and human decency. These actions seem, to me, to directly contradict the values that many Utahns hold dear. Though the books may be balanced in the short term, by all accounts, the costs are far too great.

Caroline Collett

Springville