The Trump administration gone and done it now, y’all. They went ahead and terminated this fancy federal advisory committee that was all about giving advice on how to stop infections from spreading in hospitals and such. The committee, called the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC), was responsible for setting national standards on things like washing hands, wearing masks, and isolating sick folks in hospitals. Most hospitals in the U.S. followed their guidelines, you know?
Well, turns out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) broke the news to the committee members last Friday. They sent out a letter after some virtual meeting saying that the termination actually happened way back on March 31st. Apparently, it was all in line with President Trump’s executive order to cut down on the federal workforce. Not really sure why this matters, but four professional societies had asked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to keep the committee going, but I guess it didn’t work out.
Now, some of the committee’s web pages are just sitting there, all archived and stuff. They’re still online, but no one’s updating them anymore. And some members are worried that the guidelines will just stay the same forever, even though new research and dangerous germs are out there. Connie Steed, a member of the committee since 2023, said, “At some point, when things need to change, the guidelines likely won’t change, and then people will be sort of flying by the seat of their pants.”
One of the committee members, Dr. Anurag Malani, mentioned that they were almost done with new guidelines for airborne pathogens before the whole termination thing. The guidelines hadn’t been updated since 2007, and they even had this controversial recommendation about using surgical masks instead of N95 respirators for certain germs. Malani said, “There was really a lot of important material in there and, I think, a lot of lessons learned from Covid that helped shape those guidelines to put us in a better place than we were pre-pandemic.”
Jane Thomason, the lead hygienist at National Nurses United, was pretty bummed about the committee getting the boot. She said, “While we had significant concerns regarding HICPAC’s make up and proposed guidance, the termination of the committee removes important public transparency.” Not really sure what that means, but I guess it’s not good.
The CDC letter on Friday mentioned that HICPAC had made 540 recommendations to the agency in the past three decades, and 90% of them were actually put into practice. Malani thinks it’s crucial to keep those recommendations going so that infection control stays consistent across the country. He said, “You’d want to avoid seeing state and local health departments try to figure this out on their own.”
So yeah, it looks like this committee being gone is causing some ripples in the healthcare world. Not really sure why they had to go and do that, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next.
