WASHINGTON — The first known case of Ebola contracted in the U.S. is giving urgency to moves by lawmakers to boost funding for a response after years of cuts to federal prevention and research budgets.
With health officials raising the prospect of more U.S. Ebola cases, members of the House and Senate appropriations committees plan to provide more money for the national response as part of a stopgap measure to fund government operations after Dec. 11, according to a Senate Democratic aide.
The aide, who requested anonymity to discuss the plans that haven’t been announced, said no decisions had been made on the amount or how the funding would be distributed.
Even as the U.S. is committing more than $1 billion toward a global fund to battle the virus in West Africa, the total for federal Ebola research — including development of vaccines and treatments — fell to $42.5 million in 2013 after it peaked at more than $59 million in 2006, budget figures show.
Annual funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public-health preparedness and response programs was $1 billion less in fiscal 2013 than it was in 2002, according to a CDC report.
“We have a challenge in this country in paying steady attention to public-health needs,” said Jeffrey Levi, executive director of Trust for America’s Health, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on disease prevention. “While it’s always important to find dollars in the context of an emergency, it is just as important to sustain our capacity to respond.”
President Barack Obama met with his senior advisers Monday at the White House to get an update on the government’s response to the Dallas case and on ensuring the U.S. health care infrastructure is prepared.
The meeting included Tom Frieden, director of the CDC by phone; Susan Rice, national secretary adviser; Secretary Sylvia Burwell of the Department of Health and Human Services and Lisa Monaco, Obama’s homeland security adviser.
Burwell and Frieden told Obama that federal authorities are speeding personnel and other resources to Dallas and acting to “heighten awareness and increase training for health-care workers throughout the country,” according to a White House statement.
Obama also talked with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and French President Francois Hollande about international efforts to stem the epidemic in Africa.
The infected nurse was on the team that treated a Liberian man who fell ill after entering the U.S. She contracted Ebola despite wearing the prescribed protective gear. Frieden said Monday that officials are “concerned that there could be other infections in the coming days.”
The CDC will “double down on training, outreach, education and assistance,” to keep the disease under control in the U.S. Frieden said at a briefing.
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Penn., said Congress must make sure there is enough money to help the nation’s roughly 5,000 hospitals adequately prepare for Ebola.
“We have a public-health challenge here,” Casey said on Bloomberg Television. Hospitals “need help. They need resources.”
Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, told the Huffington Post that years of flat spending has slowed research, including development of vaccines for infectious diseases such as Ebola.
“If we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready,” Collins said in the Huffington Post interview.
Funding for research on a vaccine for the disease has dropped by half since it peaked in fiscal 2010, to $17.2 million in fiscal 2013, NIH budget figures show.
The agency’s total budget rose 7.7 percent to $29.3 billion in fiscal 2013 from $27.2 billion a decade earlier. The consumer price index rose 24 percent in that period. The figure for 2013 is less than the NIH budget from the year before as automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, cut spending there by 5.2 percent.
Levi said he hoped “the message will have gotten through” when Congress passes a fiscal 2015 budget. He added that it’s still too early to assess how the decline in public-health funding may have affected the Ebola response in the U.S.
Most of the extra spending in response to the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, where the virus has killed more than 4,000 people, so far has been directed toward stopping the spread at its source.
That includes $750 million that top congressional leaders approved in a shift of funds in the Pentagon’s contingency budget. The money is earmarked for helping build isolation units, field hospitals and to train health-care workers, among other needs. The U.S. is deploying as many as 4,000 military personnel to the region to assist the effort.
On top of that, $311 million has been obligated for purchase of protective equipment, disease detection and response, community health workers and other anti-Ebola steps, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
Some lawmakers are urging additional action, including blocking entry into the U.S. of anyone coming from West Africa, where an Ebola outbreak has killed more than 4,000 people.
Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said there are about 13,000 visas “that sit in peoples’ hands in Africa to come visit the U.S.”
“We are once again asking the administration to re- establish a viewpoint about stopping these flights to the U.S., to give Dallas, Texas, and other communities a chance to catch up and work through this difficult problem,” Sessions said in an interview on CNN.
Frieden, the CDC chief, rejected calls for a travel ban. He said flights to and from the region are needed for health workers and supplies to help combat the disease. While the outbreak remained unchecked, there’s no way to eliminate all the risks, he said.
_ With assistance from Derek Wallbank, Roxana Tiron, Erik Wasson and Angela Greiling Keane in Washington, Catherine Dodge in New York and Toluse Olorunnipa in Tallahassee, Florida.