Rep. David Jolly, from Pinellas County, brought about 100 of the insects to the floor of the House of Representatives on Wednesday in attempt to show the urgency of funding to fight the disease. Mosquito-borne Zika, which emerged past year in South America and has spread to Florida, can cause severe birth defects. “Can you imagine, colleagues, the fear and anxiety in this chamber if these 100 mosquitoes were outside this jar, not inside this jar?” His office said they are still in the larvae stage but are expected to hatch on Wednesday. “The politics of Zika have gone on far too long”. Jolly said the mosquitoes in the container did not have Zika, but are capable of carrying the virus.
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Incoming House Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Land O’ Lakes, and incoming Minority Leader Janet Cruz, D-Tampa, announced last week they would urge the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the federal Food & Drug Administration to approve use of the genetically engineered mosquitoes developed by the company Oxitec. “Members of Congress would run down the hall to the physician’s office to be tested”.
The larvae were grown at the University of South Florida, where researchers are studying the virus and trying to help find an eventual vaccine.
Jolly said the time for partisan politics is over – although both sides are now arguing that the other side is playing political games.
The Senate voted down a measure with Zika funding this week.. The legislation also would ease, over the objections of environmentalists, permitting requirements for pesticide spraying to kill the mosquitoes that can spread the virus.
“I brought these mosquitos here today to convey that fear and that anxiety, of millions of Americans and Floridians”, he said.
Jolly is locked in a tough race in a redrawn congressional district against former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, who has since changed his affiliation to Democrat.
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During the seven-week August recess Congress just completed, Jolly said cases of Zika in the United States climbed from 4,000 to “by some estimates more than 16,000”.
