The Public Health Emergency declared for Texas by US health authorities this month will cut through bureaucratic hurdles to lifesaving care, but disaster prevention efforts are a more efficient use of federal dollars, scholars of health and environmental law said.

Southeast Texas, including Houston, faced back-to-back disasters earlier this month after Hurricane Beryl was followed closely by a powerful heat wave. The storm left more than one million residents sweltering without electricity or air conditioning as heat indexes surpassed 100 degrees, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The sequence of extreme weather was deadly: 15 deaths in Harris County, which includes Houston, had been attributed to Hurricane Beryl as of July 22, local officials said. Seven of those deaths were caused by heat amid power outages due to the storm.

“Often the more serious problems are either the second or the third disaster,” said Robert Verchick, a professor of disaster and climate change law at Loyola University New Orleans and a former Environmental Protection Agency official in the Obama administration. “It’s like a row of dominoes, and not having electricity for a week is a serious public health problem.”

The public health emergency for Texas, declared by the HHS on July 12, followed a major disaster declaration from President Joe Biden that unlocked federal resources to aid recovery efforts.

“The combination of severe heat and limited access to electricity is dangerous, especially for vulnerable populations and those relying on electricity-dependent durable medical equipment and certain healthcare services,” Dawn O’Connell, HHS’ assistant secretary for preparedness and response, said in a statement announcing the agency’s emergency declaration.

Cutting Red Tape

While a major disaster declaration is more “infrastructure oriented,” the public health emergency is focused on “dealing with the people hurt from the storm and dealing with the people hurt from the extreme heat,” said Jean Su, senior attorney and energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The emergency declaration is essentially a tool to cut through regulatory red tape that would impede the ability of healthcare providers to respond quickly during a disaster, said Dr. David Lakey, vice chancellor for health affairs and chief medical officer for the University of Texas System.

“There’s a lot of reporting and deadlines and those types of things that get in the way of a hospital being able to respond,” said Lakey, a former commissioner of the state’s health department. “The emergency just takes some of that bureaucratic work off the table for a while for them to be able to concentrate on caring for these individuals.”

Dialysis patients, for example, may have a care provider that’s unable to operate after the hurricane, Lakey said. The emergency declaration would allow them to quickly receive treatment elsewhere, and also to replace supplies they may have lost in the storm, he said.

The emergency declaration unlocks emergency funds and allows HHS to take steps including modifying certain privacy and telemedicine requirements, adjusting Medicare reimbursements, deploying additional personnel, and more.

But Verchick urged officials to invest more resources in preparing for disasters ahead of time, rather than solely reacting once they happen.

“Of course responding to disasters is extremely important, but it’s more important to take actions that prevent the harms to begin with,” he said. “That is money that goes so much further in the prevention stage than it does in the recovery stage.”

Additional efforts to protect against extreme heat would be particularly helpful in predominantly Black and Latino communities, Verchick said. Those places often face disproportionate harm from high temperatures because of policies that have funneled mitigation resources toward wealthier and whiter areas.

The Texas public health emergency is the first such declaration HHS has made this year, though it has twice renewed public health emergencies for wildfire recovery in Hawaii and for the opioid epidemic nationwide. The agency declared five public health emergencies in 2023.

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Federal officials said their agents took down the man leading one of the largest drug operations in the history of the United States, hailing it as a big step forward in the fight against fentanyl.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas announced during a press conference Monday afternoon that Minsu Fang, 48, was indicted on July 17 for four counts of conspiracy to import, export, and manufacture fentanyl.

According to federal charging documents, Fang and his associates sent raw materials used to make fentanyl from China to the United States. The fentanyl precursors eventually ended up in Mexico, where they would be made into laced pills and then sent back to the U.S. for sale and distribution.

Investigators said Fang and his co-conspirators avoided law enforcement interdiction by mislabeling packages, lying about the contents, and mixing them with other products. As a result, the shipments were allegedly admitted into the U.S. without a detailed inspection of the individual contents.

Between August and October of 2023, federal officials said agents seized approximately 100 shipments in Laredo, Texas, containing more than two tons of raw materials, enough to make millions of pills. Fang was arrested in New York on June 19 on an arrest warrant.

U.S. Attorney Alamdar Hamdani said it’s possible drugs manufactured by Fang’s team could have ended up in Houston but emphasized that there was no way for them to know for sure. Their goal is to encourage parents to have a conversation with their children about the dangers of fentanyl.

“You’ve got children who think they’re taking Percocet, Oxycodone, or Adderall. They have no idea that those pills are laced with fentanyl because a friend gave it to them. What ends up happening is those kids don’t wake up the next day. Our plea to parents is that one pill shouldn’t be a death sentence. This is part of trying to cut that out,” Hamdani said.

Fang, a Chinese national, is scheduled to appear before a U.S. magistrate Tuesday morning. If convicted, he faces up to life in prison on each count of conviction and a $10 million fine.

For more on this story, follow Rosie Nguyen on Facebook, X and Instagram.

The Southeastern Conference has ruled that Texas Longhorns opponents won’t be penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct for throwing the “Horns Down” symbol. The SEC’s ruling on the controversial gesture runs counter to the Big 12’s effort to minimize it.

“The act itself needs to be offending to the senses,” SEC coordinator of officials John McDaid, per ESPN. “If you took that act out of a football stadium and did it in a shopping mall or a grocery store, would it offend the senses to a majority of the reasonable people in the area? That signal would not. You might have some people that share that signal with you, if you did that at a grocery store or a shopping mall, depending where you are. We’re going to evaluate it in context.”

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