When fighting disease becomes political, chaos is never far behind.
For months now, public health experts and scientists have been sounding the alarm over the steady march of the Zika virus toward the U.S. They even predicted where it would make landfall — Florida, Texas, New York.
And they were right.
There have been six cases of the mosquito-borne virus reported so far in Florida, and New York has seen 530 cases related to travel.
So what are we doing about it?
Well, right now, we’re doing what we do best when a public health crisis hits this country — playing politics.
In February, President Obama asked Congress for $1.9 billion to address the budding threat of Zika following the advice of his experts at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. But once again the Republican-led Congress is dragging its feet. It waited four months to respond and then provided just two-thirds of the requested funding.
And they made sure to load up the bill with limits on contraception for women and cuts in important federal health programs.
The result? Zika is here and there isn’t enough money to contain it.
If you want to understand what that means, consider Puerto Rico with more than 7,000 cases and counting. We now await the consequences of these infections on the children and fetuses of the affected mothers. Zika does little to adults but can cause permanent brain damage to the young and the unborn.
As a pediatrician and public health researcher, I have seen this up close.
In the hot, humid lowlands of southwest Guatemala, I help run a clinic where the Colorado School of Public Health and Children’s Hospital Colorado have been doing research to find out how much mosquito-borne infections affect the villagers. It’s called the Center for Human Development and sits on a banana plantation surrounded by nearly 28,000 people. Our testing has found out that two of every three children have already suffered from Zika this past year. That’s stunning. So this infection spreads like a plague, except that there is no vaccine, no cure for microcephaly and nowhere to hide. And don’t think it won’t happen here. It already has.
Yet rather than mobilize against this threat we are taking the familiar road of political stonewalling.
We know what happens when we do too little and act too late in the face of infectious disease. In 1981, as President Ronald Regan completed his first year in office, the AIDS epidemic entered the history books as one of the most feared and costly diseases ever fought. The Reagan administration provided scant funding to study and combat the deadly HIV virus, which was stigmatized as a disease of gays and Haitian immigrants. Millions of people were infected, including Hollywood stars, famous singers, sportsmen, wives, husbands and children. Thirty-five years and more than $440 billion later, we have transformed what had been a death sentence to an often manageable illness.
In 2014, the Ebola virus sparked panic here and reminded the global public health community that we are not up to the challenge of early detection and response. The late implementation of surveillance, diagnosis and control led to 28,616 cases of Ebola in West Africa, 11,310 deaths, and close to $5 billion spent to contain this international health emergency.
When fighting disease becomes political, chaos is never far behind. Perhaps it will take the expansion of the Zika outbreak in the American South, with its resulting panic, for lawmakers to act with common sense rather than political calculation.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration is frantically shifting funds from cancer research and the fight on poverty to the development of a Zika vaccine that could be priceless if the outbreak becomes widespread in this country. The stubbornness of Congress to provide the necessary funding to scientists and public health agencies to contain Zika is even more astonishing if you consider that we are now entering the peak mosquito season, which runs from August to October.
Lawmakers have a constitutional and moral obligation to provide the means to battle this epidemic. If all they understand is politics, they might consider the backlash that could befall them if Southern states like Florida and Texas see Zika outbreaks. Who will the citizens hold responsible for failing to protect them?
So Congress, do your job and vote for more Zika funding. This virus is here, it’s spreading and it’s not colored blue or red.
Edwin J. Asturias is a pediatrician and associate director of the Center for Global Health at the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The views expressed above by Dr. Asturias are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
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