Statements On Introduced Bills And Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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By Mr. DURBIN (for himself and Mr. COCHRAN):

S. 621. A bill to amend the Public Health Service Act to coordinate Federal congenital heart disease research efforts and to improve public education and awareness of congenital heart disease, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I rise to speak on legislation I am introducing today that relates to congenital heart disease research.

Congenital heart disease is a rapidly growing national health problem. Congenital heart defects are the most common and most deadly form of birth defects, affecting nearly 1 percent of births, approximately 36,000 a year. In fact, a child is born with a congenital heart defect every 15 minutes. A congenital heart defect occurs when heart structures are malformed, missing or in the wrong place. There are over 30 types of congenital heart defects. These defects cause congenital heart disease--cardiovascular problems caused by the birth defect.

The good news is that modern medicine has made major advances in treating heart defects in newborns. In 1950, a child born with a congenital heart defect only had a 20 percent chance of surviving, but today that number has increased to 90 percent. Due to the increase in childhood survival rates, the congenital heart disease population increases by an estimated 5 percent every year.

However, the bad news is that there is no cure for congenital heart disease. Even survivors of successful childhood intervention face lifelong risks, including heart failure, rhythmic disorders, stroke, renal dysfunction, and neurocognitive dysfunction. Sadly, the estimated life expectancy for those with congenital heart disease is significantly lower than for the general population. The life expectancy for those born with moderately complex heart defects is 55, while the estimated life expectancy for those born with highly complex defects is between 35 and 40.

Unfortunately, fewer than 10 percent of adults living with complex congenital heart disease currently receive the cardiac care they need, and many don't know that they should have life-long specialized health surveillance. Even with access to the best care, living with congenital heart disease involves risk. But for people who don't have the medical care or who don't have it promptly, the risks of premature death or disability are much higher.

In 2004, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute convened a working group on congenital heart disease. This group recommended developing a research network for clinical research, establishing a national database of patients, and creating an outreach education program on the need for continued cardiac care.

Today, I am pleased to introduce the Congenital Heart Futures Act, which builds on these recommendations in several ways. First, the legislation authorizes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, to lead a comprehensive public education and awareness campaign around congenital heart disease. Next, it authorizes a National Congenital Heart Disease Registry at the CDC to track the epidemiology of congenital heart disease and creates an advisory committee to provide expert information and advice to CDC. And, finally, it authorizes congenital heart disease research through NHLBI.

Despite the prevalence and seriousness of congenital heart disease, research, data collection, education, and awareness are limited. The Congenital Heart Futures Act will help prevent premature death and disability in this rapidly growing but dramatically underserved population.

I say to those who are interested in promoting health research, this is an area where we can expend more effort and save more lives. I hope my colleagues will take a look at this legislation which we are introducing today and join me in cosponsoring it.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed int he Record.

There being no objection, the text of the bill was ordered to be placed in the Record

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By Mr. DURBIN (for himself, Mr. CORKER, and Mrs. MURRAY):

S. 624. A bill to provide 100,000,000 people with first-time access to safe drinking water and sanitation on a sustainable basis by 2015 by improving the capacity of the United States Government to fully implement the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005; to the Committee on Foreign Relations.

Mr. DURBIN. Later this week we will mark World Water Day. It is an important reminder of the many challenges we continue to face in providing clean water and sanitation to the world's poor.

We have made progress in recent years, but around the world today, nearly 1 billion people continue to lack access to clean, safe water. More than 2 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. Most of these people live on less than $2 a day. They are the voiceless and the powerless of the world.

That is why today, Senator BOB CORKER and Senator PATTY MURRAY and I are introducing the Paul Simon Water for the World Act in the United States Senate. Congressmen BLUMENAUER and PAYNE have introduced the same bill in the House.

Our bill will reestablish U.S. leadership on one of the defining challenges of the 21st century: water.

The goal is to reach an additional 100 million of the world's poorest people with sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. This would represent the largest single commitment of any donor country to meeting the Millennium Development Goal on water, which is to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015.

The bill targets aid to areas with the greatest need. It helps build the capacity of poor nations to meet their own water and sanitation challenges. It supports research on clean water technologies and regional partnerships to find solutions to shared water challenges.

The bill provides technical assistance--best practices, credit authorities, and training--to help countries expand access to clean water and sanitation. Our development experts will design the assistance based on local needs.

The Water for the World Act also designates within the State Department a high-level representative to ensure that water receives priority attention in our foreign policy, and establishes a new Office of Water at USAID to implement development assistance efforts related to water.

We ought to be assigning some of our best minds to solve the global water challenge. Right now, however, we don't have the staff at USAID to meet our goals on water or any other urgent development need.

At a time when it is more important than ever to win the hearts and minds of those around the world, as well as to address the challenges of fragile and failed states, our top development agency is suffering from an inexcusable shortage of expert staff.

In the 1960s, USAID had more than 5,000 Foreign Service Officers; today, when the needs are greater than ever, it has just over 1,000.

To correct this imbalance and help rebuild our smart power, I recently introduced a bill that would triple the number of USAID Foreign Service Officers by 2012. It's called the Increasing America's Development Capacity Act, and it's an essential part of our efforts to rebuild America's smart power role in the world--on food security, health, economic development, and yes, water.

I owe my passion on water to my friend and mentor, the man whose seat I now occupy in the U.S. Senate: the late Senator Paul Simon.

He was a profoundly good and wise man. He was also a visionary. He saw connections that many people missed. He saw answers to problems before most people even saw the problems.

As many of you know, solving the global water crisis was his last great campaign. In 1998, he wrote a book called ``Tapped Out: The Coming World Crisis in Water and What We Can Do About It.''

Paul Simon would go anywhere, and talk to anyone, to try to get people and governments to take the global water crisis seriously. In the last year of his life, he traveled to Israel to moderate a panel between the Israeli and Palestinian water commissioners. He said that he and most of the people in the audience--were amazed that the two commissioners agreed on almost everything.

But when he looked in the newspapers the next day, there was nothing about the meeting. Not a word. He said that was ``because nobody was shouting at each other.'' That's part of the challenge.

The global water crisis is a quiet killer. In the developing world, water-related diseases claim the lives of 5,000 children every day. Diarrhea alone kills nearly 2 million children under the age of 5 each year. As CSIS's ``Global Water Futures'' report hauntingly points out, that is the equivalent of all the children under age 5 in New York and London combined.

Mothers who fear the deaths of their children bear more, in a desperate race against the odds. The lack of clean water enslaves poor women in other ways, as well. In many poor nations, women and girls walk two or three hours or more each way, every day, to collect water that is often dirty and unsafe.

The UN estimates that women and girls in Sub-Saharan Africa spend a total of 40 billion working hours each year collecting water. That is equivalent to all of the hours worked in France in a year.

A developing economy cannot grow if its people are too busy collecting water, or too sick from drinking unsafe water, to work or to go to school.

What Senator Simon knew 10 years ago, and the rest of us are slowly coming around to see, is that we can't begin to solve the problems of global hunger and poverty without addressing the global water crisis.

And water is not simply a humanitarian challenge. It is a threat to global stability and the global economy.

Last June, Goldman Sachs held a meeting to assess the top five risks facing the world economy. Resource scarcity--including competition for water, food and energy--was at the top of the list.

Fortune magazine recently predicted that the global water crisis will be as serious in the 21st century as the oil crises were in the 20th, potentially leading to war.

Paul Simon understood the potential for conflicts over dwindling supplies of clean water. It alarmed him. He used to say, ``Nations go to war for oil, but there are substitutes for oil. There are no substitutes for water.'' We see that in the roots of the conflict in Darfur.

I have seen the challenge of water in so many of my recent trips abroad.

Two years ago I travelled to Jordan after a trip to Iraq. I went to talk with people there about the impact of the war in Iraq on one of our most important allies in the region.

The Jordanian Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, Ms. Suhair-al-Ali, told me that between 600,000 and 700,000 Iraqi refugees were living in Jordan at that time. That was equivalent to 10 percent of Jordan's entire population. For us in the U.S., that would be the equivalent of 30 million refugees.

The massive influx of Iraqi refugees had strained the ability of Jordan's government to provide basic services almost to the breaking point. What did the minister identify as one of Jordan's biggest problems? Water.

It is not just Jordan. Water is central to the fate of the entire Middle East.

In his book, Paul Simon quoted former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as saying, ``If we solve every other problem in the Middle East but do not satisfactorily resolve the water problem, our region will explode. Peace will not be possible.''

You do not have to travel halfway around the world to see the devastating consequences of lack of access to clean water.

A few months ago I traveled to Haiti. This was my second visit and it is always a shock. A 90-minute plane ride from Miami takes you to another world.

There are no public sewage treatment or disposal systems anywhere in the country. Even in the capital, Port-au-Prince, a city of 2 million people, the drainage canals are choked with garbage and sewage.

It is no wonder that Haiti has the highest infant and child mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere. One-third of Haiti's children do not live to see the age of 5. The leading killer? Water-borne diseases: hepatitis, thyphoid and diarrhea.

While there, I visited a rural health clinic run by a group called Partners in Health, co-founded by Dr. Paul Farmer. Dr. Farmer is a wonderful man who has improved the lives of so many, from Rwanda to Haiti.

He showed me a water purification kit that his clinic gives to nursing mothers with HIV/AIDS. This allows them to make formula for their babies and not transmit the virus through breastfeeding. It is simple, inexpensive, and life-saving.

Some years ago I visited Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Bolivia is an example of what awaits many countries' water supplies because of global warming.

Much of its population relies on melting glaciers for its water. But because of climate change the glaciers are not being replenished and some are already disappearing. These trends are happening from the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro to the Alps to the Himalayas.

How will the world respond to the water needs such as Bolivia and others who rely on glaciers for their water supplies?

I recently returned from a visit to Cyprus. The island has been divided now for more than 30 years. The leaders on both sides are engaged in brave and important discussions to reunify the island. Amid this hopeful progress toward peace, another problem plagues this island--water.

The groundwater in Cyprus is being depleted too quickly, often for agriculture, and it is being replenished too often with salt water that creeps into the water table. Global warming is causing rainfall to decrease.

In recognition of the vast water challenges we face around the world, two years after Paul Simon died, Congress passed the Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act. President Bush signed it into law in December 2005.

It represents the first time the U.S. has codified our commitment to any of the Millennium Development Goals. The Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act makes safe water and basic sanitation a top priority for all U.S. foreign assistance.

In 2007 alone, it helped provide nearly 2 million people in over 30 countries with access to a better source of drinking water, and more than 1.5 million people with better sanitation.

The Water for the Poor Act is saving lives, but its impact could be greater. The Paul Simon Water for the World Act will help us expand these efforts to make a profound and sustainable difference in the lives of the world's poor.

As we prepare to mark World Water Day this Sunday, let us recommit ourselves to a new effort on safe water and sanitation.

Throughout history, civilized nations have put aside political differences to address compelling issues of life and survival. Our generation owes the world nothing less.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the RECORD.

There being no objection, the text of the bill was ordered to be placed in the RECORD

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