A Billion Dollars To Tackle The Zika Virus

In an effort to combat the Ziga virus through mosquito control programs, vaccine research, education and improving health care for low-income pregnant women, US President Barack Obama will ask the congress for a fund of 1.8 billion dollars, as said by the White House on Monday, 8^th February.

Zika virus, which is a member of the virus family Flaviviridae and the genus Flavivirus, gets transmitted through daytime active virus Aedes mosquito, which leads to the Zika fever. The earliest known occurrence of this fever was recorded in the 1950s within a narrow equatorial belt from Africa to Asia. However, in 2014, the virus spread eastward across the Pacific Ocean to French Polynesia, Easter Island, and in 2015, it further spread to  Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, where a whopping number of 1.6 million people have been infected with the virus.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that its emergency operations center has been put on a ‘Level 1’ status, its highest level of activation because of the Zika outbreak. The organization has in the past put its operations center at Level 1 only three times, after the Hurricane Katrina in 2005, during the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 and during the Ebola outbreak in 2014.

Pregnant women are being considered to be most vulnerable to get affected from this virus as the World Health Organization (WHO) suspects that the virus is the cause of a cluster of cases of microcephaly, a neurological disorder that afflicts the babies of pregnant women with the virus.

"There shouldn't be panic on this. This is not something where people are going to die from it. It is something we have to take seriously," Obama said."The good news is this is not like Ebola. People don't die of Zika. A lot of people get it and don't even know that they have it," Obama further elaborated. "What we now know, though, is that there appears to be some significant risk for pregnant women or women who are thinking about getting pregnant."

Obama is scheduled to submit his 2017 budget to Congress on Tuesday. If Congress approves the emergency funding request, the money would be available in this fiscal year.

When asked as to how the Congress would pay for such a huge amount, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, "Those are the kinds of things Congress will have to work out."