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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   9345 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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People dying of TB is bad. But it's net negative only for the countries with the TB problem. Why should US subsidize this?

You know how every time there's a new potential pandemic you hear about how new diseases are deadlier because the pathogen is not adapted to human hosts? And how a well adapted pathogen doesn't want to kill the host, it wants to live in the host long enough to propagate to other hosts?

TB is arguably the most human adapted pathogen out there. It has our immune system beat six ways from Sunday, kills slowly over an extended period of time, and can lie dormant for years before becoming active again (which means healthy people you let through customs may have a passive infection, and will only turn active and contagious later when they're already in the country). It is also arguably the most difficult bacterial infection to cure. You need to be on multiple powerful medications with significant side effects (including potential blindness) for 6-9 months in order to cure it.

If a TB strain managed to become resistant to one of those medications then it may not be possible to cure it, not without new drug development. In the US we've managed to mostly extirpate the disease at great cost over many years of effort. If an antibiotic resistant strain showed up it could undo decades of progress in US health.

It'd be interesting to compare the cost-effectiveness of USAID's reduction in pathogens brought to the US and quarantining all international travelers and cargo ships, including economic impact, but the counterfactual in the comment you replied to was "phase-out," not indefinite continuation.

Ah, thank you for pointing this out. It's already paid for and thus unnecessarily cruel - this is the main point. IMO good faith interpretation, from the US government perspective the management of the drug supply chain isn't free, so they are just saving on that.

Because while the NGO's left hand is open demanding money, the NGO's right hand has boatload after boatload of diseased "asylum seekers" poised on your border. One way or another, they will make it your problem.

The selfish motivation is that pathogens don't respect borders. Travel between the US and the Philippines is relatively common, almost a million Americans visited the country in 2024. Any one of them can pick up a new antibiotic resistant strain of TB and bring it home, at which point it's our problem. Solve the problems where they are so we don't have to solve them here in the future.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to:

  • Ban immigration from and travelling to the countries with this problem
  • Treat your own citizens if this issue arises

After a while these poor countries find new sponsors who will solve their problems. Or solve it by themselves.

  1. Poor countries find new sponsors, like China or Russia

  2. Poor countries start advocating for China and Russia and against the US on the world stage

  3. Europeans, who think of poor countries as intrinsically virtuous, pick up the tune

  4. Europeans become more anti-American and wrestle their governments into reducing support for US plans and military logistics

  5. Core US interests abroad, such as supporting Israel, suffer or become significantly more expensive

  6. More money winds up being spent on workarounds than it would have cost to continue bribing the poor countries

Banning all travel to and from places millions of Americans visit each year would be costly to the economy so while it might be cheaper for the government it would surely be more expensive for the country. Also, I want freedom to travel where I please. We shouldn't impose travel bans that aren't actually necessary.

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