I am not sure I want to shake hands with this man! Senator Thom Tillis (R. NC) recently went on record saying that restaurant workers should NOT be forced to wash their hands. To be fair, the senator is not against washing hands, he believes that government forcing the washing of hands is an overstepping of government authority. This is a dangerous trend in public health and as a nation we need to stand up and fight this kind of ignorant politicizing. Whether we are talking about vaccination, hand washing or other public health issues, this type of thinking cannot stand unchallenged.
If you follow Senator Tillis' thinking, all public health requirements are an overreaching of government control. If I do not need to wash my hands, then why should a restaurant owner be required to wash the dishes? For that matter who really has the right to tell anyone how cold a refrigerator should be for keeping food safe? For that matter how dare the government inspect food plants, slaughterhouses and drug manufacturing facilities! Let us let the free market sort out who lives and who dies. According to politicians like Tillis, that is the American way!
Now before this blog is accused of partisan politics, let me say that I am a registered Republican. As a member of the loyal opposition, I see the party I love falling farther from its roots and becoming a caricature of itself in these matters. Let's look at just two Republican administrations and their efforts at public health.
In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt championed two important acts. Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. These acts sought to protect the American public against adulterated foods and dangerous drugs as well as to provide for proper labeling of food and drugs that entered into interstate commerce. Unsanitary conditions, dangerous ingredients and mislabeling we common and the public health suffered for it.
Dwight D Eisenhower fought for stronger public health services in the US. His proposals on insurance, public heath training and the building of healthcare infrastructure can be read here . His words on healthcare concerns sound like they could have been written this very morning:
"As a nation, we are doing less than now lies within our power to reduce the impact of disease. Many of our fellow Americans cannot afford to pay the costs of medical care when it is needed, and they are not protected by adequate health insurance. Too frequently the local hospitals, clinics, or nursing homes required for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease either do not exist or are badly out of date. Finally, there are critical shortages of the trained personnel required to study, prevent, treat and control disease."
( Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Health Program. January 31, 1955) Today we face shortages of nurses, rural facilities that do not meet the needs of their communities, shortages of general practitioners and ever increasing costs. Eisenhower was right on the mark.
The fact is that we have public health issues all around us. The last E. coli. outbreak was just last summer . Salmonella outbreaks occurred nine times in 2014 according to the CDC. These outbreaks occur despite our current efforts. Can you imagine how much worse it would have been if we did not have the levels of regulation we currently have? How many would be sickened if we rolled back such simple things as hand washing at restaurants?
Public health issues need to be addressed and informed by our public health professionals, not by politicians. That is why the role of the Public Health Service and the Surgeon General are so important. Playing politics with public health is nothing short of playing Russian Roulette with the lives of our citizens.
