Health Officials Blast Congress Delay Of Zika Emergency Funds

By Bill Berkrot(Reuters) - Top U.S. health officials said on Monday the long delay in getting Congress to approve funding to fight the Zika virus came at a heavy cost in dealing with what they called a serious public health threat. They said the $1.1 billion in newly approved funding for Zika would be used to expand mosquito control programs, accelerate vaccine development and begin important studies of its effect on babies and children born to mothers infected during pregnancy. President Barack Obama in February requested $1.9 billion in emergency Zika funding. After months of political wrangling, Congress last week finally approved a little more than half of that to fight the virus. “Because we’ve had to wait these seven months, we haven’t been able to get a running start on some of the critically important studies to understand more fully the impacts of Zika, to establish better diagnostic tests, to improve our way of controlling mosquitoes,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adding that vaccine development efforts were also delayed. Health officials on a conference call with reporters also said money they had redirected from other efforts, such as for Ebola and cancer research, was unlikely to be reimbursed. ”There’s a cost to protecting Americans from the dollars that were reprogrammed,” Frieden said. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell promised that the new fund...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news