Time for Better Disease Prevention
by Jordan Cooper
Do I look fat? I can’t see my feet. I’m feeding two people for every meal. These are some comments pregnant women make late in their gestation. Yet, Americans have their qualms about whether we still have our swagger as a country? I think we still got it, but we must do more in the disease prevention areas and have better management at the local government levels to be the country Andrew Jackson envisioned in Manifest Destiny.
We don’t have a vaccine for the Zika virus and Flint, Michigan had lead contaminated water for nearly two years. When our new moms’ water breaks they my find out that since the water was broke in their hometowns their child won’t be able to live on their own due to lead poisoning. Then, the Zika virus can virtually go undetected until you give birth and your child has a below average sized brain, which makes it more difficult for your child to develop as it should. Additionally, in the United States we have the highest maternal mortality rate among first-world countries. On top of this, we need 90,000 more doctors to meet our healthcare needs as a nation today. Less than 5 percent of practicing doctors are black and less than ten percent of attorneys are black environmental attorneys.
Who are we serving? We will represent ‘ray Ray’ who disobeyed the police, but we won’t make sure our own communities’ water is clean? Moreover, there isn’t enough accommodations for pregnant women across the board in workplaces to prevent or suppress the crippling birth defects the aforementioned issues bring. Furthermore, we are the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have paid maternity leave universally.
The extra costs are rocketing in school districts, doctor’s offices, and homes to be able to give these adversely affected students the best chance to be self-sufficient in America. Now, the government is just telling us this is how it’s going to be and you may not see the infinite amounts of opportunities our founding fathers thought of when conceiving America. We must come together as Americans to keep the strong supporter and the weak taken care of.
Jordan Thomas Cooper is a 2015 graduate of the University of South Carolina with a degree in History and a 2010 graduate of the RealEstate School of Success in Irmo. He is the first African-American to serve in both the governor and lieutenant governor’s office as an aide and first to serve in the Inspector General’s Office in S.C. (Haley) He is also the first person to serve in the top three offices in the gubernatorial line of succession in South Carolina (Haley, Bauer, McConnell). He says research shows he is the second black presidential campaign speechwriter in American history and the first for a GOP presidential campaign (Bush 2015). He also played football for Coach Steve Spurrier.