Yale School of Public Health Professor Albert Ko on Monday joined the state’s two U.S. senators and others as they called on Congress to approve $1.9 billion in federal funding to fight the Zika epidemic as it spreads in the United States.
Ko, M.D., who has worked with Brazilian colleagues in Salvador on the mosquito-borne virus since it first appeared there nearly a year ago, said federal funding was critical to responding effectively to the outbreak and protecting people, particularly infants, against a range of serious side effects.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal said that President Barack Obama has proposed the funding and it is now up to Congress to act. Each day of congressional inaction allows the virus to spread and put more people—unnecessarily—in danger.
“This is a potential public health emergency,” Blumenthal said during a press conference in the Legislative Office Building in Hartford. “This issue is too important to be stalled [in Congress].”
Blumenthal’s colleague, Sen. Chris Murphy, noted that the mosquito-breeding season is underway and failure to approve funding to combat the insects that spread the disease could have grave consequences.
“This [federal funding] is a no brainer,” Murphy said. “We should get it done as soon as we return to Washington.”
There is no effective treatment to offer people afflicted with the disease, no reliable diagnostic test to determine if someone is infected with Zika and no effective means to slow its spread.
Albert Ko
Monday press conference also featured officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, state health agencies and companies who are working on vaccines. They all echoed the call to quickly allocate federal funding to better respond to the disease.
Ko, who is chair of the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the School of Public Health, said that currently there is no effective treatment to offer people afflicted with the disease, no reliable diagnostic test to determine if someone is infected with Zika and no effective means to slow its spread.
In poor urban communities such as Brazil’s slums or favelas, the disease has spread rapidly and with devastating consequence. Thousands of infants have been born with microcephaly, a condition marked by a smaller than normal head circumference and, in many cases, diminished cognitive ability. Zika is also associated with damage to eyesight and hearing and Guillain-Barre syndrome, which affects the nervous and immune systems.
Brazil was the first country in the Americas to be hit by Zika. It has since spread rapidly throughout the region, affecting most of South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. Puerto Rico has been particularly hard hit, and some predict that half of the island’s population could become infected, Murphy said. Given the state’s close association with Puerto Rico, this could have serious consequences for public health in Connecticut.