Inside the Outbreaks

"It really is. This book is for a new generation what a book written by Berton Roueché called The Medical Detectives was, which I remember reading as a kid. They’re detective stories and they’re interesting and they’re human interest and they’re about saving lives. It’s really exciting. In EIS, you get a problem, you don’t know if it’s going to be a big problem or a small problem, you don’t know if it’s going to spread or not, you don’t know if you can stop it or not and you’re working against time. Kate Winslet played an EIS officer in the movie Contagion. There’s a drama to this work that’s real and exciting. EIS takes young doctors and, as Alex Langmuir, who created the programme, said, we basically throw the EIS officers in the water and see if they can swim, and if they start drowning we haul them out and then we throw them back in. So you’re taking young doctors and you’re putting them in charge of huge investigations. When I was in New York City I worked on a typhoid outbreak and helped stop it. I worked on a cryptosporidium outbreak in a homeless shelter. But my time was really dominated by the tuberculosis outbreak – a massive large outbreak of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis spreading through multiple hospitals in multiple parts of the city. I was right out of my training programme and I was basically in charge of how to detect and stop it. At CDC we also have a global mandate, because we can’t keep Americans safe unless we work globally. So what we’ve done is to create EIS-like programmes in more than 30 countries. We’ve helped more than 2,500 disease detectives graduate in more than 40 countries around the world, where lots of diseases aren’t detected and aren’t stopped. About 80% of the graduates of these programmes stay in those countries in leadership positions in public health. So EIS is, in many ways, at the heart of CDC’s work. Contagion I think there’s a misperception that CDC is only about infectious diseases and only about the US. I’m an infectious-disease-trained physician – I did my work in tuberculosis control, I took care of hundreds of patients with HIV. But public health is about empowering individuals and communities to live longer and healthier lives. It’s about protecting people and keeping them safe from threats. Those threats include getting run down by a drunk driver. Those threats include eating food that you thought was safe but is going to give you a heart attack or a deadly infection. CDC has 2,000 staff who work in 50 countries around the world keeping Americans safe and saving lives in those countries. That’s a key part of CDC because we are all connected. Not only within communities – where your not getting your kids vaccinated may endanger my kids – but throughout the world, because a community not knowing that the disease is spreading or not controlling it is just a plane ride away from making people sick or killing them here."