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CDC's top laboratory on STDs is shut by Trump administration
The Trump administration fired everyone in a CDC lab that is crucial to tracking drug-resistant gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases. "We are blind," an expert says.
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. One of the fired employees, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, noted the lab holds the world’s largest repository of gonorrhea isolates — over 50,000, dating back to 1988 when the CDC began to collect them. Julie Dombrowski, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington and director of the Seattle and King County public health department’s HIV, STD and hepatitis C program, stressed that no one should expect the private sector to step in to fill the gap the closure has created.
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