Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Madam President, I come to the floor to join my colleagues because I share their very real concerns about the impact of the Zika virus on families in New Hampshire--also not a tropical State--the impact on people across the country here in the United States, and also on people around the world.

As has been pointed out, we have seen reports in regions with active mosquito-borne transmission of the virus, places such as Brazil, where they are about to host the Olympics. People will be traveling there from all over the United States, from all over the world. We have seen those stories of women who have had children with severe birth defects, with microcephaly, as a result of their exposure and contracting the virus during pregnancy.

We have also seen impacts on adults. The connection that seems to be there, and I think we are still waiting on definitive research, but the connection in adults between Guillain-Barre syndrome and the Zika virus is also very real. While fortunately in America in most cases that can be treated, the reality is, in a lot of places around the world and for some people, it causes severe paralysis and sometimes even death. So this is not just something that affects pregnant women, but there are also concerns about who else might be affected by this virus.

As we have heard from North Dakota, as we have heard from other States, as mosquito season arrives in this country, we can expect additional Zika cases, transmitted often by mosquitoes from tropical areas, that people contract when they are traveling. We know this mosquito is coming to America. In New Hampshire, where neither of the two known mosquito vectors currently live, we have already had three cases of Zika, with about 150 possible cases that are still being tested.

Two of those cases were acquired as a result of traveling to Zika- impacted regions, but the third was contracted because of sexual transmission of the disease from a partner who had been traveling. Last week I chaired a roundtable on Zika in Concord, NH, in our capital. We had representatives who are looking at what might happen with the virus and our planning for an outbreak, which we hope we can avoid.

We had doctors from the State, we had the State epidemiologist, we had the director of the State lab, and we had people who are working on mosquito control. They talked about how over the last several months they have been getting more and more questions about Zika, particularly from women who are planning to have children in the near future, and for pregnant women and their families or women and their partners who are beginning to think about starting a family.

As Senator Heitkamp pointed out, the threat of Zika is very real. We had one of the doctors, an obstetrician, at that roundtable who reported that many of her family patients are canceling vacations they had planned and some of her patients whose husbands are in the military who are stationed in Zika-infected countries are concerned about how to protect themselves and what they need to do when they return.

We heard from folks at our New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services who talked about the importance of increased access to family planning and contraceptives and the Zika outbreak impact on the need for those services. It gives us a new lens on the importance of making sure women and families have access to this health care.

We need to make sure all women at risk or diagnosed with Zika have access to comprehensive, patient-centered contraceptives and preconception counseling. We also heard from the folks involved with mosquito control. What they told us is, there are two mosquitoes that can spread the Zika virus, that we know of at this time. One of those is a mosquito that is only in the tropics, that we are never going to see in northern New Hampshire and in northern New England.

The second mosquito, we have already found in Connecticut and Massachusetts. The mosquito control folks said that unlike the usual spraying for mosquitoes, which is in wetland areas and swampy areas in New Hampshire, this is a mosquito that, as Secretary Burwell has described it, ``can breed in as little as a capful of water.'' They are mosquitoes that bite people four times in order to get a meal, so they spread very fast.

What we heard from the mosquito control folks who were at this meeting was that they are encouraging people to look at places in their yards where water might collect in small spaces, in wheelbarrows, in paint cans, in places we would not normally think about mosquitoes growing.

They also encouraged people to think about protecting themselves. When you are going out, think about covering up, wearing long sleeves, wearing slacks, wearing socks when you are outside at a time when mosquitoes might be around.

The other concern about the Zika mosquito is that it also is active during the day. It is not like most of the mosquitoes we see in New Hampshire, which are active at night. This is a mosquito that is also active during the day. So we need to be taking action now. I listened to the head of the State lab in New Hampshire talking about the challenge of getting results from the lab for people who had been tested for Zika.

He said: Sometimes we have to send out to labs. We don't have the capacity in New Hampshire to do the analysis that is required. We are still looking for a test that can definitively determine if somebody has had Zika in the past. He said: Something as small as the ability to ferry the samples and the results back and forth to a lab is one of the things we need so we can get answers so we know how to act.

The folks who are trying to get information out to the public talked about the need to have support so they could get information out, both to the medical community and to individuals, about the importance of what individuals need to do to take action.

They said very directly to me, as I said that I appreciate this is something we need to work with you on in Washington, they said: We don't have the resources to respond to this in the way we need to in New Hampshire. For those people who would say: Don't worry. You are exaggerating. This is never going to come to New Hampshire, well, that is what they told us about the West Nile virus. That is what they told us about EEE. We have had deaths in New Hampshire in recent years from both of those viruses. So I think we need to act on this. I know there has been an agreement in the Appropriations Committee, among the appropriators on both sides of the aisle. It has been a bipartisan agreement to help get a supplemental funding bill to the floor to address this because in New Hampshire what I have heard is that we need help. We need Washington to help us. If we are concerned about the cost of this, just think about what our inaction will do? What if we have an outbreak and we have people who--we have thousands of women, as they do in Brazil, who have been infected and who have had babies with microcephaly. What are the health care costs to people who might have been infected by the Zika virus, with Guillain-Barre syndrome, with other birth defects as a result of being infected during pregnancy?

So this is a bill we can't afford to wait on. We need to address this. If folks are not willing to do it because it is the right thing to do, they ought to be willing to do it because it is the cost- effective thing to do. I hope we can come together. I know people on both sides of the aisle are concerned about this. We need to come together. We need to address this. It is a pending public health emergency. We have to respond.

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