Zika is creeping into the United States and the pressure on Congress to act is mounting.
On Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell penned a letter to Congressional leaders urging them to appropriate more funds for Zika efforts, warning them that key programs, including the development of a Zika vaccine, were in jeopardy because of a lack of money.
As if to prove the point, HHS announced on the same day that it was awarding a $4.1 million grant to a Massachusetts-based company, Hologic, to develop a blood-screening test that will be able to better-identify the presence of the Zika virus in blood samples.
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The Senate approved a $1.1 billion package to fight Zika earlier this year, but the bill died in the House, where GOP leaders said they only wanted to back a funding measure that would be revenue neutral.
They proposed funding the Zika programs with money that had been previously earmarked for fighting the Ebola virus, a proposal Senate Democrats said they couldn't agree to.
Republicans have said that the Obama administration has more money at its disposal than it is letting on. In a letter to Burwell, Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, both from Texas, said the administration still has not dipped into the $374 million that it had reallocated toward Zika efforts.
HHS disputes that allegation. The department has spent $222 million that it "repurposed" for Zika, it said in a Tuesday news release.
On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton also urged Congress to pass a bill funding an effort to fight the disease. Congress, currently recessed as members campaign for re-election, should reconvene to "put the resources into this fight," the Democratic nominee said.
The heightened sense of urgency comes in the wake of the first reports of U.S. residents contracting the virus from mosquitoes in the United States, rather than abroad. Florida officials have now acknowledged 16 confirmed cases of people becoming infected over the past two weeks from local mosquitoes.
Tuesday also brought another Zika-related death. An infant in the Houston area died shortly after birth because of complications related to the disease, which the mother had acquired while in Latin America. It is only the first death in Texas, but it is the 99th case of an infant born with microcephaly, the severe birth defects caused by Zika.
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