Rick Scott Shuts Down TB Hospital Amid “Worst Outbreak in 20 Years”

Despite a warning from the Centers for Disease Control, it’s the latest move by the Florida governor to gut public services.

This story has been updated.

Welcome to the Sunshine State: Republican-run since 1998, tea party-controlled since 2010, and fast becoming one of the lowest-service states in the nation. Which helps explain how lawmakers shut down its only tuberculosis clinic last month, just as the worst outbreak of the infectious disease in America’s recent history flared up with a vengeance in Jacksonville, Miami, and who knows where else—an outbreak that state and local officials sat on until last month, according to an investigation published by the Palm Beach Post.

Tuberculosis—the lung-liquefying disease of “consumption”—is the world’s second-biggest infectious killer, but had been largely eradicated in America in the early 20th century, owing to improvements in health services. A few flare-ups, mostly of foreign origin and mostly affecting indigent populations, continued to occur sporadically in the United States, which was why Florida in 1950 opened the AG Holley State Hospital in Lantana, just west of Palm Beach.AG Holley’s website (which has since been taken down by the state) billed the facility as “the only public health hospital in Florida,” a safe place where TB victims could be quarantined and cured, and one of the last such facilities in the US.

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Republican FL GOV Shuts Down Only Tuberculosis Clinic During TB Outbreak

Published on Jul 11, 2012