We detected Aids through a federal early warning system. Trump has decimated it | Robert B. Shpiner

On Friday, the presidential personnel office sent termination notices to members of the National Science Board. This will undermine our public health effortsIn June 1981, I was a young pulmonary fellow at one of the three Los Angeles hospitals where the first five cases of an unusual pneumonia in previously healthy young men were being identified. I read about them, as my colleagues did, in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) – the small, dense bulletin the Centers for Disease Control had been publishing every week since 1952.None of us yet knew what we were seeing. What MMWR gave us was a signal early enough to act on, and a system trustworthy enough that we did. What became Aids would, over the next decade, reshape every assumption I held about clinical medicine. I have spen