1. United States
2. Mo.
3. Letter

I'm contacting you because I am appalled that President Trump is using an executive order to halt the disbursement of funds to support global health programs among other foreign aid. Congress already approved these investments and they are not optional - they are the law. They are also necessary for humankind - if we stop fighting these diseases globally they grow, mutate, and become harder to fight here in the United States of America. We currently have the largest tuberculosis outbreak in US history in Kansas City. We need to be supporting doctors and global health organizations here and worldwide to fight these diseases so they don't spread here in America or anywhere else. We can't leave the rest of the world to disease and pretend that it won't come back here. Pausing or halting TB medication in the middle of someone's treatment allows the bacteria to develop resistance to our existing drugs. This will mean hundreds of thousands of infections developing bacterial resistance, increasing the likelihood that more extensively drug-resistant strains of TB will emerge and spread. It's hard to overstate how bad this will be. I am absolutely shocked by the inhumanity and lack of foresight involved here. This is an unprecedented event in the history of human health--a government suddenly and without any warning putting tens of millions of lives at risk. We could easily see overall human life expectancy decline for the first time in generations. I am urging you to follow the laws already approved by Congress and continue to fund global and local health initiatives immediately. Not 90 days from now when the diseases we're fighting have spread and worsened - now.