As Donald Trump proposes gargantuan cuts to a variety of government programs, the CDC faces another threat: Emergency funding requested by the last administration to combat the spread of the Zika virus in the United States is about to run dry.
Many previous health crises have been responded to with similar one-time bullets of funding, Wroblewski said. But unlike the 2014 Ebola outbreak or the 2009 swine flu epidemic, which came and went, Zika is likely to persist. Like its mosquito-borne cousins dengue and West Nile Virus, Zika may pop up every year.
“Zika is not something we can respond to this year and then move onto the next crisis,” she said. “It’s going to be something we pay attention to every mosquito season — and in travelers in the off season. We need more of a sustained response.”
It’s unclear whether the CDC will have much wiggle room in their budget in the coming year. The budget blueprint presented by President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget in March proposed a 17.9 percent cut to the Department of Health and Human Services, which CDC falls under. The OMB did not return requests for comment.
There have been over 40,000 reported cases of the disease, which can cause catastrophic neurological defects and death in developing fetuses, in the United States and US territories since 2015. Mosquitos carrying the virus have now been identified in Florida and Texas.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Two-thirds of cable's April sequester coverage was on potential flight delays:
As you might expect, MSNBC was the channel most likely to cover things other than the potential for flight delays, but overall, the delays have gotten a disproportionate amount of coverage. Predictably, the coverage of the flight delays has caused Republicans to once again care about the sequester, and by care about the sequester I don't mean caring about ending the sequester, I mean caring about blaming big bad Barry O'Bummer for it.
A perfect example: Yesterday, House Appropriations Chairman Mike Rogers slammed FAA for allegedly failing to warn Congress that the sequester might impact their operations. The implication: If Republicans had only known about the impacts of the sequester, they would have avoided it—instead, they were kept in the dark by the tyrannically incompetent (oxymoron intended) Obama administration. The only problem: The FAA did warn us what would happen if the sequester moved forward, and Republicans did nothing to stop it, rejecting every offer the president put forward, even when he volunteered to commit political suicide.
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today's Kagro in the Morning show: Trump campaign county chair busted for sex trafficking. Follow-up on two famously absurd GunFAILs: M.D. Harmon & Tex McIver. Today in emoluments: Trump’s still selling condos, increasingly to undisclosed owners, and now he’s selling NSCride-alongs.