Add to the stupidity of the Trump administration slashing funding to prepare for and respond to the next deadly pandemic outbreak. These are the unwanted border crossings we should actually be worried about, and by helping people in countries where diseases are breaking out we could also be protecting ourselves.

The investments made after the 2014 Ebola crisis have been slashed in recent proposed federal budgets from the Centers for Disease Control, the agency that works to stop deadly diseases in their tracks, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which responds to international disasters, including the Ebola outbreak. Moreover, Timothy Ziemer, the top White House official in charge of pandemic preparedness, has left his job, and the biosecurity office he ran was summarily disbanded…

Perhaps most terrifying, difficult to treat and highly fatal strains of H7N9 avian influenza are spreading throughout China.

This strain of bird flu causes rapid respiratory illness with associated multiorgan dysfunction that’s easily spread by a small droplet. That’s why it’s so difficult to control and why recurrent epidemics continue to crop up: There have been five epidemics of H7N9 since 2013 in China alone, the most recent between the fall of 2016 and fall of 2017. Across these epidemics, among the 1,565 confirmed cases, about 40 percent of infected individuals died.