by Alena Zhang ’18, News Editor

With over 15,000 confirmed Zika cases in the US, government officials in the southeast have entered a state of panic. Although New York recently surpassed Florida as the state with the highest number of travel-related Zika reports, the disease continues to spread north from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

In mid-June, congressional Republicans drafted a Senate bill that would allocate $1.1 billion to combat the disease. However, the vote failed 52 to 48, with sixty votes needed to advance the legislation. In 2014, Obama asked Congress to approve a $6 billion funding initiative aimed at fighting the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Since then, the White House has reportedly spent over $700 million of that money to tackle Zika. Student Abbey Zhu ‘18 believes that “money should be going towards research to find a cure: not necessarily $1.1 billion, because that’s a lot of money, but a substantial amount.”

Senate Democrats argued that the bill would unfairly obstruct access to contraception and weaken environmental restrictions regarding pesticide use. It would also use funds originally apportioned for President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Republicans did acknowledge that some of the bill’s provisions favored their policy positions. Regardless of the partisan disputes, members from both parties agreed that Zika is a public health emergency. Even after a long seven-week Congressional recess, the vote still remains deadlocked.

Sanya Bery ‘17, Upper School Class President stated, “There are problems in the world, like Zika, that are actual issues that need to be addressed. I feel at times we often get caught up in our views and how they contradict that we lose sight of the actual issues. I don’t think now is a time to be deadlocked because we are too stubborn to come to a consensus. i think now is time to take a stand”

In South Carolina, some progress has been made to prevent the transmission of Zika — but not without dire consequences. On August 28, beekeepers across Summerville county awoke to apiaries full of dead bees. That morning, the district had used an aerial insecticide spray called Naled to kill mosquitoes in the area.

District officials claimed that they had notified beekeepers of the spraying two days in advance. However, an investigation showed that dozens of farms were missing from their records. Although county representatives plan to revise their practices for the future, this massive bee extermination is an irreversible tragedy.

Pollinators contribute $29 billion to farm income across the United States – if other districts make the same fumble in the same way that Summerville did, this vital agricultural market could potentially be destroyed. On September 9, Florida began using aerial sprays on Miami Beach, which is the second site that has been declared as an active zone of Zika transmission on U.S. mainland.

Pesticides often impair unintended targets because the chemical solutions are simply not specialized enough. High winds could easily move the spray off-target, and a 2015 Florida International University Study even found that Naled application was dangerous to butterflies. In high enough doses, it could cause harm to other arthropods and mammals. Despite this, experts at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claim that Naled is far safer than other chemicals. It breaks down quickly and, in the low doses at which it is prescribed, poses no threat to humans. Abbey Zhu ‘18 adds that “it should be okay to use pesticides for the time being — even if Zika research receives funding, they won’t find a cure right away.”

However, biology teacher Ms. Berkefeld disagrees with the use of pesticides: “We don’t know the long-term implications for the ecosystems that we’re affecting. If you use mass pesticides, you’re open to the risk of changing the mosquito species over time.” Just as ticks and bacteria have gained resistance to the chemicals and antibiotics that were once fatal to them, mosquitoes could potentially evolve to gain pesticide immunity. Ms. Berkefeld adds that “The biggest steps toward Zika prevention are mosquito nets and bug spray — it should be the people’s responsibility to protect themselves.”