The government won’t be able to develop long-term Zika interventions if Congress doesn’t grant additional funding to combat the virus, the nation’s top public health official said Thursday.
As House lawmakers agreed midday Thursday to a conference with the Senate to address the contentious issue, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden urged them to supply his agency with more funding to fight Zika.
“Anything we don’t do now we will regret not having done later,” Frieden said in an address at the National Press Club in Washington.
Major battles over funding to fight the rapidly spreading Zika virus have stymied lawmakers, who have yet to appropriate any additional money toward the effort. The virus, which can cause the serious birth defect microcephaly, has been detected in all but six states in the U.S.
The virus poses the greatest threat to pregnant women, whose fetuses can be seriously harmed if they are infected with it. Spread through particularly resilient mosquitos, Zika is expected to spread more rapidly through the summer months, Frieden warned.
“Memorial Day heralds the start of mosquito season in the U.S.,” he said. “We have a narrow window of opportunity for effective mosquito prevention measures, and that window is closing.”
While Republicans have questioned whether the CDC needs the $828 million it requested for Zika prevention, Frieden said that sum is his agency’s “best, most honest estimate” of what it needs to fight the epidemic. The CDC would use those funds in part to develop better ways of diagnosing Zika and halting its spread, he said.
To illustrate his frustration with the funding battles, Frieden compared the outbreak to someone drowning.
“Imagine you’re standing by and you see someone drowning and you have the ability to keep them from drowning and you can’t,” Frieden said.
“Right now the current crisis is Zika,” he said. “We need a robust response to protect American women and reduce to the greatest extent, humanly possible, the number of families affected.”
As of Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reported 591 Zika cases in the continental U.S., all of them travel-related. The agency also says 168 pregnant women in U.S. show evidence of being infected with Zika. The mosquito-borne virus has spread to more than 40 countries and territories in the Americas.
