I just had an opportunity to get a full briefing from Secretary Burwell, CDC Director Frieden, as well as Tony Fauci from NIH about the Zika situation, and I want to give the American people an update on where we are.
As it has been explained repeatedly, but I want to reemphasize, Zika is not like Ebola. This is not a human-to-human transmission, with the one exception that we’ll talk about. It’s primarily transmitted through mosquitoes, a very particular type of mosquito. But what we do know is that if you contract Zika, even if you don’t appear to have significant symptoms, it is possible for Zika to cause significant birth defects, including microcephaly, where the skull casing — the head of the infant is significantly smaller. We think that there may be other neurological disorders that are caused as a consequence of Zika, and we don’t know all of the potential effects. We do know that they are serious.
Right now, what we’ve seen is a little over 500 cases of Zika in the continental United States, and they all appear to be travel related, not mosquito-transmitted, meaning somebody from the U.S. went down to an area that has Zika, got a bite, came back. We have seen at least 10 cases in which a individual went to one of these areas, got infected, and then sexually transmitted Zika to their partner.
A more significant, immediate concern is Puerto Rico, where we know that there are over 800 cases that have been diagnosed. However, we suspect that it could be significantly higher. The reason is, is that for most people, you may not have a lot of symptoms when you get Zika. If you are not pregnant, or the partner of somebody who is pregnant or trying to get pregnant, then you may not even know that you end up having Zika. And that means that people oftentimes are not affirmatively going to the doctor and getting tested on these issues.
Now, here’s the good news, is that because of the good work that’s been done by the Department of Health and Human Services, by the CDC, as well as NIH, we have put forward a plan — we’ve got a plan over the next several months to begin developing a vaccine and to continually improve our diagnostic tests. We’re also working with all the states so that they’re properly prepared if we start seeing an outbreak here in the primary United States during the summer when obviously mosquitoes are more active.
And what we’re also trying to do is to develop new tools for vector control, meaning how do we kill mosquitoes and reduce their populations, particularly this kind of mosquito. That’s a tricky piece of business because we’ve been using a lot of insecticides for a long time that have become less and less effective. New strains of mosquitoes become resistant to the insecticides that we have. The methods we use aren’t as effective as they used to be. And so we’re also investing a lot of time, research, logistical support to states and local communities to start improving our ability to control mosquitoes.
Puerto Rico is more urgent, and some of the territories, but we’re also spending time working with the states so that they can be better prepared.
All of this work costs money. And we have put forward a package that costs $1.9 billion in emergency funding in order for us to make sure that we are doing effective mosquito control, to make sure that we are developing effective diagnostic tools and distributing them, make sure that we are developing the vaccines that ultimately will prevent some of the tragedies that we’ve seen for those who have contracted Zika and then end up having children with significant birth defects.
