He said the $589 million will need to be replaced.
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HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell said recent Ebola flare-ups in Guinea and Liberia, where more than 1,000 contacts are now under monitoring and a ring vaccination strategy has been deployed, underscore the point that the USA role in the Ebola response isn’t over.
Government officials said on a conference call with reporters that they expect “local transmission” of the virus in the southern U.S.by this summer.
About three-quarters of the approximately $600 million will go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is working on vaccines, treatments for infected people, and controlling the mosquitoes that spread the virus, the Associated Press reported.
But they believe there will likely be local transmission in the continental United States in the coming months.
They called on Congress to pass a request made in February for $1.9 billion in emergency funding to combat the virus, as well as supplemental funding to replenish the money that will be diverted from Ebola. Health officials said the virus was confirmed after both persons had recovered. Most of these infections were acquired while traveling outside the country.
“If you look to see where Zika is devastating families, mothers and their unborn babies or their newborn babies throughout the Americas, it’s in the areas of extreme poverty”, Dr. Hotez said. “We can not wait for the fall”, Donovan said.
John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said he fears a Zika outbreak in his home state of Texas, but said he hopes “reason would prevail and we’d use the money that’s already been appropriated and then we’d talk about what additional money would be needed, perhaps for either Ebola or Zika”.
But these transferred funds are not enough to fully pay for Zika response in the United States this year.
White House budget director Shaun Donovan said the move was only a temporary fix, however.
Funding is “urgently needed”, he explained, for a number of priorities including accelerating vaccine research and development, conducting surveillance of mosquitoes, educating healthcare providers, pregnant women and their partners and creating more effective diagnostic tests.
President Obama first asked for the emergency funding on Feb 8, and members of Congress have balked at the $1.9 billion request, demanding that the administration tap unused Ebola money.
“I’m taking money from other areas that we fund in order to fund the very important Zika research, particularly the Zika vaccine research”. The president was briefed Tuesday, March 22, 2016, on the Brussels attacks that killed dozens of people. “We can’t set one crisis aside for another”, she said.
Most people won’t show symptoms of Zika, according to the CDC, and it is rarely fatal.
Symptoms of the virus include fever, conjunctivitis or rash and joint pain.
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Now state health officials are hoping to educate Missourians on the risks of the virus and how they can prevent it.
