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 spent about a month working as part of a Zika response and research team studying an outbreak of the disease.

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.

The Marshall Islands Health Department reported the country’s first confirmed case in late February, according to news reports. The CDC’s Website lists the Marshall Islands as having evidence of mosquito transmission of Zika, and advises residents and travelers there to “practice enhanced precautions.”

Nailing down a precise timeline for the spread of the disease in the island nation, which is near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, is difficult because of a lack of medical resources, Bish said. Samples taken from people with possible infections need to be sent to Hawaii for testing, which adds weeks of waiting for any effort to define the scope of the disease’s reach.

While Bish and her team were in the country, she said, they 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. Part of the team tracked, trapped and studied mosquitoes — the major way Zika spreads — while Bish and others did a public education campaign aimed at residents.

The focus was twofold, she said: 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.

“One thing that really stood out was how challenging it really is to control our physical environment,” Bish said. “A little divot in the ground; a little ditch beneath a tree — that’s where water’s going to lay.”

Bish said the experience brought the scope of the task before public health officials working to blunt the disease’s spread both in the United States and across the world into sharp focus.

“Everybody’s going to need to take some responsibility. This can’t just be a government agency or people coming in ... An entire population’s consciousness is going to need to be risen to how the environment is contributing to the spread of things,” she said.

Bish’s role at the CDC doesn’t normally take her out into the field.

As a team leader and senior health scientist, she works at the organization’s Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

Among other actions, the center oversees 26 public health research programs run by universities around the United States. Bish is a research and evaluation scientist in charge of determining whether those programs, which receive CDC funding awarded in five year cycles, are being run effectively, and using her evaluations to determine best practices for similar programs.

But it’s her winding path to the CDC that has made her a hot commodity for public health officials studying Zika.

She returned to school at age 40 and earned a master’s degree in public health and a doctorate in health science from Emory University.

Her background in agriculture combined with her experience in the Pacific Islands got her tapped to participate in the Marshall Islands deployment.

Part of that background is an undergraduate degree in agriculture from the Delaware Valley College of Science and Agriculture.

She’s also been asked to serve a months-long term on a Zika-focused pregnancy task force being assembled by the CDC.

Bish’s background with the CDC’s reproductive health division — where she worked for three years in collaboration with public health officials in Mississippi — again make her someone officials want on their team.

“Because I know public health systems and working with (state and regional) departments of public health, and have reproductive health experience ... I’m getting called, which I love,” she said.