More than five months after US President Barack Obama, have asked for $ 1.9 billion to combat the Zika virus outbreak, members of Congress will make your home barbecue on July 4th without approving the expense.
Although Washington's dysfunction is predictable due to the current electoral climate, the international inertia front of efforts to combat mosquito-borne disease was less noticeable.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has only $ 7.9 million dedicated to combating zika, which is spreading in 60 countries and is blamed for more than 1,600 serious birth defects, especially in Brazil.
The planet had never seen a virus transmitted by mosquitoes that causes microcephaly, resulting in babies born with small heads and brain damage. In the Americas, the zika is spreading in people who had never been exposed and therefore did not develop any natural immunity.
To put the lack of perspective in funding: the Olympic torch relay, which lasts three months and ends at the Games opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, this winter in the Southern Hemisphere, sponsored by Coca-Cola, Nissan and Bradesco, has a larger budget than the wHO strategy to combat zika in two years.
"The activities proposed by WHO and its partners received little funding so far and without sufficient resources, the answer probably will not be successful," the WHO wrote in his Strategic Response Plan Zika.
A lesson of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, is that the world needs to respond quickly to outbreaks, said Anne Schuchat, deputy director of the Center for Control and for Disease Prevention.
"We need the world to speed up and we can not wait for the resolution of all politics and all the problems," Schuchat said in an interview earlier this month. While health authorities are responding with the money they have, no acceleration materialized. "Things are a little stagnant at the moment in terms of real response."
The WHO, which is part of the United Nations, sought US $ 25 million for the first six months of the crisis, the international body declared public health emergency on February 1.
Governments and charities have pledged only US $ 4.1 million to date, with donations from Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Norway and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The US, the UK and the great powers of the European Union contributed nothing.
To try to make up the shortfall, WHO borrowed another $ 3.8 million from an emergency fund set up after the outbreak of ebola - made due to the delay of funding and inadequate international response to that crisis.
The organization based in Geneva says it expects to require another $ 122 million for the Zika virus by the end of next year. "We have to mix the funds and the teams of other programs to be able to support a response," said WHO spokeswoman Nyka Alexander, by e-mail. "This is not sustainable in the long term."
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