On Friday the Florida State Department of Health reported four cases of Zika, and on Monday, another ten. All were likely contracted locally from mosquitoes in Wynwood, a north Miami neighborhood. The CDC is advising pregnant women not to travel to the area. Meanwhile, hundreds of women have tested positive for Zika virus in Puerto Rico. At least 2% of blood donors in Puerto Rico have recently been infected with Zika: another ominous sign the infection is spreading rapidly.
Given the geographic distribution of the Zika-transmitting Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the US, we fully expected to see Zika cases in Florida, Texas and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast and in the Caribbean. What we didn’t expect was that Congress would be so slow to fund emergency efforts to control the spread of Zika.
Congress just went on vacation without approving emergency funds to fight the disease. They won’t reconvene until after Labor Day. In February, President Obama requested $ 1.9bn from Congress, and the Administration has continued to press Congress for funds since then. But according to US House Speaker Paul Ryan, “There is plenty of money in the pipeline right now, money that is not going to Ebola, that was already in the pipeline, that can go immediately to Zika.”
Republicans haven’t wanted to allocate new emergency funds, wanting hold to caps under the routine appropriations process.
The Ebola epidemic should have taught us the importance of strengthening disease surveillance and health systems at home and in those parts of the world where new disease threats are most likely to emerge. I suspect Republicans have been quick to push for reallocating Ebola monies to the Zika fight because they think it’s foreign aid. But, by analogy, is it foreign aid to gather intelligence or train foreign troops in the Middle East? Or are we doing that to protect ourselves?
Strategically supporting disease surveillance and health systems in Africa and elsewhere is very much about protecting our national security. But that takes time and money.
Related: Florida issues warning after cluster of new Zika cases in Miami neighborhood
Meanwhile, the Zika funding bill currently before Congress includes provisions to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. Democrats argue that Planned Parenthood provides important obstetric and gynecological services, especially to poor women. These services include birth control, and when necessary, abortions – all services that women will need to prevent having Zika-affected microcephalic babies.
American views on abortion shifted in part due to another infectious disease: a rubella outbreak in the 1960s resulting in over 20,000 babies being born with microcephaly and other birth defects. Abortion was no longer just a sign of moral failure. It became a white, middle class issue, in much the same way that opioid abuse has today. But regardless of where you stand on abortion or Planned Parenthood, I’d argue that we need new funding to fight Zika.
Our system for financing public health emergencies is broken. If we were under attack by Russia or North Korea, you can bet that Congress would immediately approve emergency funding to fight back and defend our shores. We have federal disaster relief funds on hand should an earthquake or hurricane or flood hit. But when a public health threat strikes, we’re caught off guard with our pants down.
We can’t keep playing this shell game: defunding long-term, strategically important public health programs to respond to emergencies. Siphoning off funds from other public health programs – such as the national strategic stockpile of vaccines and other emergency supplies to combat epidemics – to fight Zika doesn’t make sense either. Moreover, local public health departments – our frontline defense against disease outbreaks –have suffered huge funding cuts and lost one-fifth their manpower since the 2008 recession.
We know that the combined forces of globalization, climate change, population growth, urbanization and poverty will lead to more frequent disease outbreaks. It’s our “new normal.” And we can be certain that members of Congress will try to leverage any crisis to their party’s advantage. But politics must not get in the way of our ability to protect the American people. We must insist on stable, permanent funding for public health emergencies because we know there are many more to come.
It’s time to acknowledge that sometimes being a world leader means doing what’s best for our people – even when that means doing good for the rest of the world too.
Related: Democrats demand Congress end its vacation to approve Zika funding
Think Zika just affects Brazil? It"s here in the US now | Celine Gounder
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