Federal officials continued to ratchet up the cautionary rhetoric regarding Zika as they called for more fiscal support at a White House briefing on Monday, according to CBS News.
"Everything we look at with this virus seems to be a bit scarier than we initially thought," said Anne Schuchat, MD, the principal deputy director of the CDC.
The Obama administration has committed over $500 million in leftover Ebola funds to combat Zika, but Anthony Fauci, MD, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said the leftover Ebola money "is not enough for us to get the job done...it's just a temporary stopgap."
President Barack Obama previously called for $1.9 billion in emergency funding to assist with the international Zika fight, and to bolster preparations and resources in the continental U.S. and vulnerable island territories like Puerto Rico. But voting for the emergency funds has stalled in congress.
The World Health Organization recently confirmed an international scientific consensus that Zika is indeed connected to the birth defect microcephaly, a condition in which babies are born with abnormally small heads, and Guillain-Barré syndrome. Recent research has connected the virus to another brain disease that functions similarly to multiple sclerosis.
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