Editorial, Opinion Piece Discuss U.S. Role In Zika Response
Chicago Sun-Times: Editorial: Fight Zika as hard as we fought Ebola
Editorial Board
“…[H]aving learned from [Ebola’s] unsettling experience, Congress should address Zika with the same urgency it showed for Ebola. … The U.S. leads the world in medical solutions, cures and disease eradications. Medical professionals, say top experts, need money now to attack Zika aggressively. … As we learned from the Ebola scare, we don’t handle this stuff well when it makes it to our shores, or seems to be too close … Clearly the lesson of Ebola is to fight these things at their source. We have learned” (3/13).
Wall Street Journal: The U.S. Is Botching the Zika Fight
John J. Cohrssen, former associate director of President George H.W. Bush’s Council on Competitiveness, and Henry I. Miller, physician, founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the FDA, and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
“…[The] Food and Drug Administration is blocking progress on a vital tool to control the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that carry and transmit Zika and the viruses that cause dengue fever, chikungunya, and yellow fever. … The Oxitec mosquito should be regulated by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service … [but] the department demurred. It ceded jurisdiction to the FDA, which is unqualified to review the mosquito … With the Zika threat becoming more ominous, the president should take immediate action to unravel the regulatory tangle. The Agriculture Department should be directed to accept jurisdiction over the Oxitec field trial and subsequent tests of insect biocontrol agents (genetically engineered or not)…” (3/13).
The KFF Daily Global Health Policy Report summarized news and information on global health policy from hundreds of sources, from May 2009 through December 2020. All summaries are archived and available via search.