Hawaii island lawmakers are upset after last-ditch attempts failed in recent days to secure hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding for a Hilo lab that has been leading efforts in East Hawaii to study rat lungworm disease and educate the public on ways to prevent it.
Privately, some legislators say that the funding bill died because of a political fight between Senate Ways and Means Chairwoman Jill Tokuda and Sen. Kai Kahele, who played a central role in trying to reorganize the Senate, including plans to oust Tokuda from her powerful position overseeing the budget.
The larger reorganization effort appears dead, but Tokuda is now on the brink of losing her position as Ways and Means chairwoman. The full Senate is expected to vote on ousting her today, the last day of the legislative session.
Kahele was the lead sponsor of the rat lungworm funding bill. Other bills that he sponsored also died in conference committee where House and Senate negotiators scramble to reach final agreement on bills.
Any bill with an appropriation needed to be approved by Tokuda.
Tokuda denied that she killed the rat lungworm bill as retaliation against Kahele.
Tokuda announced last week that $1 million in funding for rat lungworm disease was going to the state Department of Health, which in effect diverted the funds away from the Hilo lab.
She said in an interview this week that the Health Department was the most appropriate agency to receive the funding and that heath officials could give some of the money to the Hilo lab, run by Sue Jarvi, if they thought it was appropriate. She stressed that rat lungworm disease is a statewide problem.
“If you were to just centralize resources at UH-Hilo you would not be able to have quick deployment efforts statewide,” Tokuda said.
“Right now, it’s about a health and safety issue,” she added. “It’s about making sure that appropriate public health responses are put into place, that we mobilize quickly. That is what those resources are put in there for.”
Dozens of rat lungworm cases have been confirmed in recent years in East Hawaii, the Puna district in particular, which has long been considered the epicenter of the problem. But a few cases have been reported on Oahu, Maui and Kauai in recent years.
This year there has been a significant spike in known cases — 13 so far this year, with several on Maui. On average, there are usually about six confirmed cases annually, according to Health Department data. The spike in cases has alarmed some lawmakers and health officials who say that the prevalence and severity of rat lungworm cases could be on the rise, particularly with the migration of the semi-slug, which can carry thousands of larvae.
Snails and slugs are the main transmitter of the disease, a condition in which parasitic worm larvae infect people’s brains. The disease can be painful and in severe cases lead to meningitis, long-term disability and even death.
Department of Health Director Virginia Pressler said that her department is looking into how to best use the $1 million appropriation, which is divided up over two years, provided that the governor releases the funding. She said the department has been in contract with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and hopes to cooperate with the counties, Invasive Species Council, Department of Agriculture and farmers to address the threat.
“We are gathering information to start work on a strategic plan that would be effective and comprehensive across the state if we do get the money,” Pressler said.
She said it was too early to say whether any of it would go to Jarvi’s lab on Hawaii island.
Sen. Russell Ruderman, who has fought for funding for Jarvi’s lab for the past couple of years, said he was disappointed that the bill to fund Jarvi’s work died.
“When someone gets sick, this lab is who they call,” he said. “This lab helps individual cases and it helps figure out how we are going to fight it and how we are going to treat it. It is not some theoretical college research. It’s how are we going to fight this disease. They are the ones learning and figuring it out.”
The lab had hoped to use the funding to research commercial washes that might be effective in killing the larvae and to study whether the disease can be transmitted within catchment water, among other things.
Kahele said he didn’t know whether the rat lungworm bill was killed because of politics. He said he had not received an explanation for why that bill and several others of his died in the last days of the legislative session.
“I would hope that retribution wasn’t the case, but this is also politics,” he said. “I haven’t had anyone come up and say to me that your bills were killed because of a specific vendetta or retribution or because you did this or you did that. I would be extremely disappointed if I did find out that that was the case, in particular for the rat lungworm bill.”
