Bish

ATLANTA — Connie Bish spent her childhood in Butler Township fascinated by science and agriculture, and looking for a way to combine those two passions.

She never guessed her career path would eventually lead her to an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, where she worked as part of a government team studying the Zika virus.

Bish, who has spent the past 15 years working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was sent to The Republic of Marshall Islands — an island nation in the Pacific Ocean — earlier this year. She worked as part of a Zika response and research team studying an outbreak of the disease which is spread mainly by mosquitoes.

According to news reports, the virus, which has been connected to serious birth defects and neurological damage in some patients, first emerged in the Marshall Islands in early 2016.

Bish said her team encountered about 60 potential cases of Zika, managed to confirm three, and recorded about 20 “presumptive positives” tests which found antibodies for Zika or other, similar diseases, but required more testing before a definitive diagnosis could be reached.

Bish, who previously spent years working in the Pacific Islands — a region that includes New Zealand, Fiji and Australia — said the challenges of this illness facing experts are daunting.

“It takes months,” Bish said. “You would like to think that you could do these things really fast, but it’s an iterative process. And to make sure you have all the facts you have to go through that process.”

Bish and a team of epidemiologists visited the country in mid-May and stayed for about a month, she said.

The focus was twofold: teach people where mosquitoes breed and how to eliminate those habitats, and provide them kits with items like insect repellent, condoms and other things that might help reduce the disease’s transmission through bug bites or sexual contact, the two major ways Zika is known to spread.