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by Nancy Maddox, MPH, writer and Gynene Sullivan, MA, CAPM, senior specialist, Communications

“ Sometimes you run into such really difficult situations,” said Mike Pentella, PhD, recalling his work during the 2009 influenza A( H1N1) pandemic that killed roughly 12,000 US residents and sickened about 60 million more. At the time, Pentella was overseeing disease control activities at the State Hygienic Laboratory at the University of Iowa.

The cost for a courier to transport the infectious disease sample to Atlanta? $ 5,000.

Ultimately, the influenza isolate did make its way to CDC in timely fashion, but only because the agency sent its own courier to collect it.“ And it did turn out to be the outbreak strain,” said Pentella.“ If they hadn’ t helped out in that situation— myself not having those kinds of dollars [ in my budget ]— we would have been delayed in knowing we had H1N1 in Iowa.... I really appreciated CDC that day.”

This concern, among others, has driven bipartisan efforts to establish a permanent, federal fund for public health emergencies: immediately accessible money that can be tapped to bridge the gap between the onset of a public health crisis and appropriation of supplemental federal funding.

What happens in the early days of a crisis, said Scott Becker, MS, executive director of APHL, will influence how it unfolds:“ If you can control [ the problem ] while it’ s an ember, you can prevent the wildfire.”

Just last year, for example, a different microbe was threatening the United States: Zika, a mosquito-borne virus capable of causing devastating neurological birth defects in babies born to infected women. By August 2016, well over 150,000 cases had been reported in the southern Americas— including over 5,000 in Puerto Rico— and the very first cases of local transmission in the continental US were documented in Florida.