Now that they’ve blown through weeks by doing standard Republican science shuffle—why, we just don’t know enough!—the Senate is finally getting close to providing some funds to research and prevent Zika.
After a three-month delay, the Senate is acting on President Barack Obama's request for money to combat the Zika virus.
The Senate is slated to vote Tuesday on three competing plans to battle the virus, with a bipartisan plan that cuts Obama's $1.9 billion request to $1.1 billion having the greatest chance to advance. The procedural vote would pave the way to add funds for the government's response to Zika to an unrelated spending bill.
While the GOP fiddlers’ chorus has been rosining up their instruments, the number of travel-related cases in the U.S. have topped 500. But that’s not the worst of it. Confirmed local cases in the mainland are probably still a few weeks off, but Zika is spreading quickly in U.S. territories, with more than 700 locally-acquired cases. Of the identified cases, 65 are pregnant women. So it’s tragic, but not surprising, that we’re seeing this news.
Puerto Rican health officials said Friday they had confirmed the territory's first case of microcephaly caused by the Zika virus ...
Zika's known to cause a range of birth defects, including devastating brain damage that results in a smaller-than-normal head, a condition known medically as microcephaly. It also causes paralyzing conditions such as Guillain-Barre syndrome and it killed one Puerto Rican man who died from bleeding.
It’s not clear whether the mother in Puerto Rico had an abortion. Abortions are very limited in Puerto Rico—a fact that may only deepen the tragedy of this disease.