Puerto Rico Officials Concealed Leptospirosis Outbreak After Hurricane Maria: Report
Source: The Daily Beast
Puerto Rican officials should have declared an epidemic of leptospirosis after Hurricane Maria but, instead, denied that it was happening, several medical experts have told CNN. A mortality database obtained by TV news outlet after suing the island’s Demography Registry lists 26 deaths in the six months after Maria caused by leptospirosis, a bacterial illness known to spread through water and soil after storms. Experts called the number “extraordinary.” Joseph Vinetz, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego and an expert on the disease, said: “There’s no other way of putting it... The numbers are huge.” In November, Puerto Rico’s secretary of health, Rafael Rodríguez Mercado, told local radio “200 cases per week” were needed to declare an epidemic. “It really emphasizes the challenges we have in addressing leptospirosis public-health issues in Puerto Rico,” said Albert Icksang Ko, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health. “This information should have been public and I’m surprised you had to sue in order to get this information.”
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something as serious as this. It just shows how devastated Puerto Rico was by the major hurricane and points to the trump maladministration in the end.
germ phobia may have something to do with this. His policies are no doubt darker than this at its roots, but think about how he kept people off the USS Comfort - only allowed 6 patients a day, and how children in detention centers are not allowed to be touched. And sick detainees put in "cold boxes" per Lawrence O because it "kills germs". 
