Zika fight
Congress plays political games while front-line forces lack necessary funding.
The threat of the Zika virus has plenty of public health experts warning people to stay away from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil. How long until someone makes a similar warning about the upcoming Super Bowl in Houston? The mosquito-borne Zika virus is associated with severe brain defects in newborn children and there’s a serious threat of a Gulf Coast outbreak.
But instead of responding with an urgency befitting this slow-motion epidemic, our elected officials in Washington are treating Zika just like any other issue and have exploited the growing crisis to further a political agenda.
Back in February, the White House asked Congress to appropriate $1.9 billion to battle Zika. It took until last week for the Senate to approve $1.1 billion in emergency funds and the House voted to shift $622 million away from other programs, such as anti-Ebola efforts.
People on the front lines of fighting Zika, from scientists working on a vaccine to Mayor Sylvester Turner, have all agreed that the House bill simply isn’t enough money. It is, however, a political maneuver to undermine the Clean Water Act.
Instead of working to fight Zika, House Republicans cynically repackaged an old bill called the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act and slapped the word “Zika” on it. Pesticide fans in Congress have been working for years to pass that bundle of anti-regulation rules, which would relax permitting requirements on using certain chemicals near water.
However, if Washington politicians listened to the public servants charged with fighting Zika, they wouldn’t hear too much talk about regulatory burdens. They would hear calls for more federal funding.
Most mosquito control agencies already have the authority to use pesticides without permits to fight infectious diseases. There’s no similar emergency mechanism to ensure that the National Institutes of Health has enough money to develop a Zika vaccine. Instead, scientists have been forced to cannibalize other important programs, like fighting malaria and tuberculosis.
Meanwhile, the city and county have to face the specific challenge of fighting the Zika-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito. The usual strategy of spraying pesticides at night won’t work on a species that bites during the day.
Local officials instead have to confront the insects more directly, either by eliminating the standing water where mosquitoes spawn or distributing mosquito repellent. Those two options are labor intensive and expensive. People in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, where garbage-heap breeding grounds are common and all-day air conditioning is a luxury, lack the resources to afford the most basic protection against the Zika-carrying mosquitoes. If the government doesn’t step in, we risk poor neighborhoods becoming hot zones for viral outbreaks.
We’ve faced this challenge before, tropical disease expert Dr. Peter Hotez wrote this week in the scientific journal PLOS. Back in 1965, the federal government launched a mosquito eradication program that was administered through local and state health departments. It was difficult and often involved house-to-house source reduction and spraying, but the program worked. Now, in the face of a new challenge, our elected officials seem unwilling to muster the political will our nation demonstrated decades ago in the fight against tropical diseases.
Zika is coming to Houston. Maybe those first pictures of a newborn baby’s misshapen skull at Texas Children’s Hospital will scare our elected officials into action. By then it will be too late.