5 ms·

Illinois joins WHO global outbreak network after U.S. withdraws

137 points by doener 9mo ago

irishcoffee 9mo ago
[flagged]
- shigawire 9mo ago
  [flagged]
- nine_zeros 9mo ago
  [dead]
RestartKernel 9mo ago
Is there any benefit to individual states joining the WHO in lieu of the federal government? As silver lining, I mean.
- toomuchtodo 9mo ago
  Improves detection and response around public health concerns. Current hot topics are measles [1] and syphilis [2] outbreaks. [1] America’s Measles Crisis Is Spiraling - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-03/measles-cases-in-south-carolina-worsen-us-health-crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-03/measle... | https://archive.today/XXYZt https://archive.today/XXYZt - February 3rd, 2026 [2] Syphilis Resurgence: Rising Rates, Public Health Challenges, and Future Strategies - https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.com/features/syphilis-resurgence-us/ https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.com/features/syphilis-r... - September 26th, 2025
  - caseysoftware 9mo ago
    Measles is popping up in numerous countries the last couple years. Canada has way more cases than the US in absolute numbers and it's catastrophic per capita. It'd be great to start digging into the "why" and figure out how to mitigate the sources. > Canada has seen an alarming increase in the number of measles cases since the outbreak began in October 2024, with a total of 5,380 probable and confirmed cases as of Jan. 10, according to Health Canada. Ref: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/measles-manitoba-18-new-confirmed-cases-9.7059574 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/measles-manitoba-18-... > In recent months, six countries in the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) European region that had previously eliminated the disease have officially lost their measles-free status. In other countries, measles is once again considered endemic. > Although the decision to remove these countries’ measles-free status was taken last September based on 2024 data, the World Health Organization (WHO) did not release the information publicly until this week, once all countries had signed off. Ref: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/what-does-it-mean-lose-measles-free-status-and-can-countries-get-it-back https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/what-does-it-mean-lose-mea...
    - tialaramex 9mo ago
      > It'd be great to start digging into the "why" and figure out how to mitigate the sources. The "why" is that Measles is an extremely infectious viral disease and so it spreads easily. You "mitigate" this by vaccinating everybody you can once they're old enough and thus creating herd immunity. We already knew that a long time ago. Or I suppose if you think God King Donald J Trump's misfiring brain controls reality you could ask him to Truth that measles doesn't exist any more. Good luck with that.
      - caseysoftware 9mo ago
        Can you explain what Trump has to do with the health practices of Canada, the UK, Belgium, or a dozen other European countries in 2024? Or more importantly - what happened in 2015/2016 in these countries when measles first started reappearing?
        tialaramex 9mo ago
        Growing Anti-vax sentiment results in a gradually falling fraction of immunised population, Measles is an infectious disease with about 20:1 ratio, but obviously incidence is somewhat random, so a population with only 80% vaccination might go five years with no problem, while one with 90% gets unlucky and sees a rash of cases. This grew as part of a general "Facts aren't true" era in which we've deployed powerful technology that's able to spread nonsense very quickly to gullible people. Trump is just another symptom and his rise to power in the US in particular is also a consequence of systemic flaws in the US government, a known bad model for governments. The "facts aren't true" stuff is why the Nazis who have decided to protest near me have such a weird collection of beliefs which to them seem more or less equivalent. They believe 5G mobile telephones caused COVID, that trans people don't exist, that migrants are simultaneously both incredibly powerful, almost superhuman, and yet also very weak and entirely useless. None of this has to make any sense at all, indeed if you're the sort of person who wants to make sense of things you're not what they're looking for.
- delichon 9mo ago
  Illinois has not joined the WHO, just this particular network. The US stopped paying dues to WHO when they left. There are no dues for joining this particular network. So there's the silver lining of being able to pick and choose the WHO components that fit your needs and budget.
anthonyIPH 9mo ago
Based on the events in the 2011 film Contagion, I think this is a smart move.
jjcm 9mo ago
It's fascinating the country-ification happening with the US states as the political divide between the state level and federal level political perspectives grows wider. Much like California, Illinois plays a global scale when looked at in isolation (though at a smaller level than California). Its 1.14T GDP puts it around #20 worldwide for GDP when compared to other countries (just behind Saudi Arabia). It'll be interesting to see what other states follow suit.
- toomuchtodo 9mo ago
  Blue states combined are the second largest economy in the world, just ahead of China (3rd) but behind the US in totality. California alone is the fourth largest economy. Their economy would be worth about ~$15T. Combining resources is simply good policy imho.
  - petcat 9mo ago
    It will be interesting to see exactly where Texas decides to come down if there really was a split in the US. I have to imagine they would want to follow the rich blue states rather than be stuck footing the bill for Arkansas and Mississippi. I guess they probably just try to become their own country, like they already did once anyway.
    - rawgabbit 9mo ago
      Texas is red (rural and suburban) with big dots of blue (urban). If worse comes to worst, Texans will be fighting ourselves first.
      - kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
        Texas was Democratic 35 years ago. They also gain 100k Californians each year so becoming more and more purple.
        usefulcat 9mo ago
adornKey 9mo ago
[flagged]
- hiddencost 9mo ago
  You're unwell.
  - adornKey 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - anigbrowl 9mo ago
      Talk is cheap. What else do you have?
      - adornKey 9mo ago
        The political mainsteam and the data on my side... Illinois is the one doing the fringe thing - against data and common sense. There was plenty of time to notice what is going on with WHO. Lots of data, lots of stories... Everything was open and obvious for such a long time, that now even mainstream politics finally got it. The take from this story is that Illinois is most likely just some backwater hill billy state that embraces corruption.
        anigbrowl 9mo ago
        Sigh Is your data anywhere that I can read it and examine your specific analytical claims for myself or are you just going to bloviate about it
        adornKey 9mo ago
        For a start I think you could take a deep look at what WHO actually publishes. https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/cases https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/cases They have a nice point there "What do negative counts of cases or deaths mean?". And this is a good starting point to see what's wrong with them. Epidemiologic data usually has a date and some number as value. The main problem with WHO is that they don't use any epidemiological meaningful value for date. E.g. "Date of infection" or "Date of death" would be meaningful - they chose to use some strange reporting date instead - one that can be easily manipulated at will. And this first shows it's symptoms in negative death counts. If you can get your hand on some real data - and compare - it's very obvious. If you can track some individual cases, you can see that sometimes date of reporting and date of death differs by 6 months. The way WHO does things obviously turns data to garbage. Florida once was a good example. Florida published data like WHO for a long time. Numbers went up and down - and it looked chaotic - with measures supposedly changing things. And then one day they changed and started publishing data by date of death. Suddenly the chaos was gone, and everything followed strict mathematical epidemiologic functions. You could even write mathematical formulas with a single parameter for most of the curves - (That formula got flagged and censored here ASAP). Most likely people didn't like that the effects of measures were gone. Sadly these topics here get censored too quickly to get any meaningful discussion going... If you're interested in real epidemiological data - you're mostly on your own. The first thing to do with data is to get meaningful axis - then you can take care about the Y-Axis and figure out if data gathering was stable (it wasn't...) and then maybe correct for changes in data gathering. Getting real epidemiological data is often a challenge - some states still make a big secret about meaningful numbers. But it exists and is available - there were enough official publications and leaks. If WHO was willing they could publish meaningful data instead. WHO consistently failed for years to publish meaningful epidemiological data. They publish widely misleading data to be used by politicians. And they're not amateurs and they're not doing this by accident. The best thing would be to send those crooks to jail ASAP. Another point to think about is that politics turned against them. This is something that doesn't happen for fun. Something like that takes years. People spent years writing literal books about what's wrong with WHO - tracking money and corruption... Even slow thinkers in politics meanwhile got the memo... but the slowest of the slow haven't got it, yet.
bamboozled 9mo ago
Is this the point of the "states" in America, if the administration is a failure, states can basically secede and just get back to sensible governance / getting work done ?
- zamadatix 9mo ago
  There were a lot of reasons for keeping states as states when the US formed. Anything from fears of too much centralized power to being a compromise to get agreement from all of the states at the time. Secession wasn't one listed as a states right though, in either the original Articles of Confederation or in the Constitution. Since then, the Supreme Court has consistently held it would effectively require a constitutional amendment defining secession for a state to be able to legally secede. So the realistic paths are still only "pretty much the whole country wants to dissolve and come up with something new instead" or "revolution". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_States#Disputed_legality_of_unilateral_secession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_States...
  - bamboozled 9mo ago
    Thanks for the response!
qwikhost 9mo ago
Time for each state to get independent
HardwareLust 9mo ago
Why is this flagged?
- dmarchand90 9mo ago
  Cause tech is controlled by MAGA.
- frumplestlatz 9mo ago
  Does the world really need yet another /r/politics ?

137 points by doener 9mo ago

irishcoffee 9mo ago

[flagged]

shigawire 9mo ago
[flagged]
nine_zeros 9mo ago
[dead]

RestartKernel 9mo ago

Is there any benefit to individual states joining the WHO in lieu of the federal government? As silver lining, I mean.

toomuchtodo 9mo ago
Improves detection and response around public health concerns. Current hot topics are measles [1] and syphilis [2] outbreaks. [1] America’s Measles Crisis Is Spiraling - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-03/measles-cases-in-south-carolina-worsen-us-health-crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-03/measle... | https://archive.today/XXYZt https://archive.today/XXYZt - February 3rd, 2026 [2] Syphilis Resurgence: Rising Rates, Public Health Challenges, and Future Strategies - https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.com/features/syphilis-resurgence-us/ https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.com/features/syphilis-r... - September 26th, 2025
- caseysoftware 9mo ago
  Measles is popping up in numerous countries the last couple years. Canada has way more cases than the US in absolute numbers and it's catastrophic per capita. It'd be great to start digging into the "why" and figure out how to mitigate the sources. > Canada has seen an alarming increase in the number of measles cases since the outbreak began in October 2024, with a total of 5,380 probable and confirmed cases as of Jan. 10, according to Health Canada. Ref: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/measles-manitoba-18-new-confirmed-cases-9.7059574 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/measles-manitoba-18-... > In recent months, six countries in the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) European region that had previously eliminated the disease have officially lost their measles-free status. In other countries, measles is once again considered endemic. > Although the decision to remove these countries’ measles-free status was taken last September based on 2024 data, the World Health Organization (WHO) did not release the information publicly until this week, once all countries had signed off. Ref: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/what-does-it-mean-lose-measles-free-status-and-can-countries-get-it-back https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/what-does-it-mean-lose-mea...
  - tialaramex 9mo ago
    > It'd be great to start digging into the "why" and figure out how to mitigate the sources. The "why" is that Measles is an extremely infectious viral disease and so it spreads easily. You "mitigate" this by vaccinating everybody you can once they're old enough and thus creating herd immunity. We already knew that a long time ago. Or I suppose if you think God King Donald J Trump's misfiring brain controls reality you could ask him to Truth that measles doesn't exist any more. Good luck with that.
    - caseysoftware 9mo ago
      Can you explain what Trump has to do with the health practices of Canada, the UK, Belgium, or a dozen other European countries in 2024? Or more importantly - what happened in 2015/2016 in these countries when measles first started reappearing?
      - tialaramex 9mo ago
        Growing Anti-vax sentiment results in a gradually falling fraction of immunised population, Measles is an infectious disease with about 20:1 ratio, but obviously incidence is somewhat random, so a population with only 80% vaccination might go five years with no problem, while one with 90% gets unlucky and sees a rash of cases. This grew as part of a general "Facts aren't true" era in which we've deployed powerful technology that's able to spread nonsense very quickly to gullible people. Trump is just another symptom and his rise to power in the US in particular is also a consequence of systemic flaws in the US government, a known bad model for governments. The "facts aren't true" stuff is why the Nazis who have decided to protest near me have such a weird collection of beliefs which to them seem more or less equivalent. They believe 5G mobile telephones caused COVID, that trans people don't exist, that migrants are simultaneously both incredibly powerful, almost superhuman, and yet also very weak and entirely useless. None of this has to make any sense at all, indeed if you're the sort of person who wants to make sense of things you're not what they're looking for.
delichon 9mo ago
Illinois has not joined the WHO, just this particular network. The US stopped paying dues to WHO when they left. There are no dues for joining this particular network. So there's the silver lining of being able to pick and choose the WHO components that fit your needs and budget.

anthonyIPH 9mo ago

Based on the events in the 2011 film Contagion, I think this is a smart move.

jjcm 9mo ago

It's fascinating the country-ification happening with the US states as the political divide between the state level and federal level political perspectives grows wider. Much like California, Illinois plays a global scale when looked at in isolation (though at a smaller level than California). Its 1.14T GDP puts it around #20 worldwide for GDP when compared to other countries (just behind Saudi Arabia). It'll be interesting to see what other states follow suit.

toomuchtodo 9mo ago
Blue states combined are the second largest economy in the world, just ahead of China (3rd) but behind the US in totality. California alone is the fourth largest economy. Their economy would be worth about ~$15T. Combining resources is simply good policy imho.
- petcat 9mo ago
  It will be interesting to see exactly where Texas decides to come down if there really was a split in the US. I have to imagine they would want to follow the rich blue states rather than be stuck footing the bill for Arkansas and Mississippi. I guess they probably just try to become their own country, like they already did once anyway.
  - rawgabbit 9mo ago
    Texas is red (rural and suburban) with big dots of blue (urban). If worse comes to worst, Texans will be fighting ourselves first.
    - kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
      Texas was Democratic 35 years ago. They also gain 100k Californians each year so becoming more and more purple.
      - usefulcat 9mo ago

adornKey 9mo ago

[flagged]

hiddencost 9mo ago
You're unwell.
- adornKey 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - anigbrowl 9mo ago
    Talk is cheap. What else do you have?
    - adornKey 9mo ago
      The political mainsteam and the data on my side... Illinois is the one doing the fringe thing - against data and common sense. There was plenty of time to notice what is going on with WHO. Lots of data, lots of stories... Everything was open and obvious for such a long time, that now even mainstream politics finally got it. The take from this story is that Illinois is most likely just some backwater hill billy state that embraces corruption.
      - anigbrowl 9mo ago
        Sigh Is your data anywhere that I can read it and examine your specific analytical claims for myself or are you just going to bloviate about it
        adornKey 9mo ago
        For a start I think you could take a deep look at what WHO actually publishes. https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/cases https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/cases They have a nice point there "What do negative counts of cases or deaths mean?". And this is a good starting point to see what's wrong with them. Epidemiologic data usually has a date and some number as value. The main problem with WHO is that they don't use any epidemiological meaningful value for date. E.g. "Date of infection" or "Date of death" would be meaningful - they chose to use some strange reporting date instead - one that can be easily manipulated at will. And this first shows it's symptoms in negative death counts. If you can get your hand on some real data - and compare - it's very obvious. If you can track some individual cases, you can see that sometimes date of reporting and date of death differs by 6 months. The way WHO does things obviously turns data to garbage. Florida once was a good example. Florida published data like WHO for a long time. Numbers went up and down - and it looked chaotic - with measures supposedly changing things. And then one day they changed and started publishing data by date of death. Suddenly the chaos was gone, and everything followed strict mathematical epidemiologic functions. You could even write mathematical formulas with a single parameter for most of the curves - (That formula got flagged and censored here ASAP). Most likely people didn't like that the effects of measures were gone. Sadly these topics here get censored too quickly to get any meaningful discussion going... If you're interested in real epidemiological data - you're mostly on your own. The first thing to do with data is to get meaningful axis - then you can take care about the Y-Axis and figure out if data gathering was stable (it wasn't...) and then maybe correct for changes in data gathering. Getting real epidemiological data is often a challenge - some states still make a big secret about meaningful numbers. But it exists and is available - there were enough official publications and leaks. If WHO was willing they could publish meaningful data instead. WHO consistently failed for years to publish meaningful epidemiological data. They publish widely misleading data to be used by politicians. And they're not amateurs and they're not doing this by accident. The best thing would be to send those crooks to jail ASAP. Another point to think about is that politics turned against them. This is something that doesn't happen for fun. Something like that takes years. People spent years writing literal books about what's wrong with WHO - tracking money and corruption... Even slow thinkers in politics meanwhile got the memo... but the slowest of the slow haven't got it, yet.

bamboozled 9mo ago

Is this the point of the "states" in America, if the administration is a failure, states can basically secede and just get back to sensible governance / getting work done ?

zamadatix 9mo ago
There were a lot of reasons for keeping states as states when the US formed. Anything from fears of too much centralized power to being a compromise to get agreement from all of the states at the time. Secession wasn't one listed as a states right though, in either the original Articles of Confederation or in the Constitution. Since then, the Supreme Court has consistently held it would effectively require a constitutional amendment defining secession for a state to be able to legally secede. So the realistic paths are still only "pretty much the whole country wants to dissolve and come up with something new instead" or "revolution". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_States#Disputed_legality_of_unilateral_secession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_States...
- bamboozled 9mo ago
  Thanks for the response!

qwikhost 9mo ago

Time for each state to get independent

HardwareLust 9mo ago

Why is this flagged?

dmarchand90 9mo ago
Cause tech is controlled by MAGA.
frumplestlatz 9mo ago
Does the world really need yet another /r/politics ?