Jaroslav Folda: A familiar road

In his June 12 Point of View “Dawdling Congress means dangerous delay in Zika fight,” Dr. Charles van der Horst sounds the alarm on the same dangerous delay that David Price spoke about last week in Research Triangle Park, namely that Congress is failing to act on emergency funding for the Zika threat.

A propos of this situation, we might recall how a comparable problem was dealt with during WWII. To meet the threat of malaria to our soldiers carried by some of these same type mosquitoes, Roosevelt’s White House organized the Office of Scientific Research and Development. This organization was “an umbrella organization that oversaw all war-related, science-based work, including the Manhattan Project. OSRD was a unit of President Roosevelt’s Office of Emergency Management.”

I am quoting from Karen Masterson’s excellent book, “The Malaria Project,” which documents the fight to battle malaria, how it was done and what the results were. The needed funding was found then for the Manhattan Project and for the Malaria Project. The Office of Emergency Management provided funding for those two secret projects.

We have been down this road before. If Congress will not act, we must find a way now.

This story was originally published June 30, 2016 at 3:22 PM with the headline "Jaroslav Folda: A familiar road."