What If We Treated Gun Violence Like A Public Health Crisis?
What If We Treated Gun Violence Like A Public Health Crisis?
When U.S. officials feared an outbreak of the Zika virus last year, the Department of Health and Human Services and state officials kicked into high gear. They tested mosquitoes neighborhood by neighborhood in Miami and other hot Gulf Coast communities where the virus was likely to flourish. They launched outreach campaigns to encourage people to use bug spray. And they pushed the development of a vaccine.
"The response was swift," says former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and was even faster during the Ebola outbreak a year earlier. But last month when 50 people died and more than 400 were injured in Las Vegas, and weeks later another 26 died in Texas of the same cause, public health officials have had almost no role.
That's because the victims in Las Vegas and Texas were killed with guns. And over the last three decades, Congress has made it clear that they don't want the public health community looking too hard into the causes of the violence. "If you look at the number of people who have died or been injured from gun violence, that dwarfs the number of people who have been affected by Zika or Ebola. There's absolutely no comparison,
" Murthy says. More than 30,000 people are killed with guns in the U.S. every year. That's more than die of AIDS, and about the same number as die in car crashes or from liver disease. But unlike AIDS or car crashes, the government doesn't treat gun injuries or deaths as a public health threat. Murthy and other public health experts say it should.
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When U.S. officials feared an outbreak of the Zika virus last year, the Department of Health and Human Services and state officials kicked into high gear. They tested mosquitoes neighborhood by neighborhood in Miami and other hot Gulf Coast communities where the virus was likely to flourish. They launched outreach campaigns to encourage people to use bug spray. And they pushed the development of a vaccine.
"The response was swift," says former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and was even faster during the Ebola outbreak a year earlier. But last month when 50 people died and more than 400 were injured in Las Vegas, and weeks later another 26 died in Texas of the same cause, public health officials have had almost no role.
That's because the victims in Las Vegas and Texas were killed with guns. And over the last three decades, Congress has made it clear that they don't want the public health community looking too hard into the causes of the violence. "If you look at the number of people who have died or been injured from gun violence, that dwarfs the number of people who have been affected by Zika or Ebola. There's absolutely no comparison,
" Murthy says. More than 30,000 people are killed with guns in the U.S. every year. That's more than die of AIDS, and about the same number as die in car crashes or from liver disease. But unlike AIDS or car crashes, the government doesn't treat gun injuries or deaths as a public health threat. Murthy and other public health experts say it should.
Learn More
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