kent nickell
Well-known member
exerpts reprinted with permission from the author
This is a very engaging book on the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the CDC... covers many current persistent and emerging infectious diseases and bioterrorism threats. Chapter 13 on SARS is also very interesting in relation to today's H5N1 threat...
Beating Back the Devil, On the Front Lines With the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, 2004, by Maryn McKenna (the same person who did the CIDRAP vaccine series) She has a chapter on the 1972 battle against smallpox in Bangladesh.
""By October of 1974, smallpox was confined to only two areas of Bangladesh. But fall was monsoon season: The country was struck with the worst floods in fifty years. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the low-lying areas near the coast and riverbanks, heading for the cities. Three months later, the government destroyed the slums the refugees had created, forcing them to return to their villages with bulldozers at their backs.
Smallpox traveled with them. The disease exploded across the country, unerringly finding the percentage of the population who remained susceptible. The president declared a national emergency. WHO poured staff into the crisis. By November 1975, Foster and his eradicators had not seen a case of smallpox for two months. on November 14, they declared victory over smallpox in Bangladesh.""
and from the conclusion...
""The closest thing to a rite of passage is the annual EIS Conference, the four-day gathering in April that has not changed substantially since Alex Langmuir staged the first one in 1952.
Almost 900 alumni still worked at the CDC, so it was easy for them to come to the meeting. Others had made careers in state health departments, academic medicine, public health school faculties, and hospital staffs. They had spread out to 49 states and 40 countries, with a substantial contingent in Geneva at the WHO.
"There's a tremendous esprit de corps that builds up," said Ralph Henderson, a physician who joined the EIS in 1965, worked in Africa, and then was loaned to the WHO for most of his career. He had returned to Atlanta in retirement, where he was designing an EIS-like program for the WHO.
They graduated, if they left the CDC, into an ad hoc network that stayed engaged with the agency, understood how it operated, and was almost uniformly loyal to it.
"These people are in touch; they're all out there networking with each other," Henderson went on. "The institution becomes far more effective because it's go hands and eyes everywhere."
From Rear Admiral Clinton's remarks to the 2002 EIS graduating officers...
He gestured to the gold banner behind him, next to the U.S. flag. It bore the 205-year-old symbol of the Public Health Service; a caduceus, the millennia-old sign of the healing professions, crossed over an anchor wound about with a heavy chain.
"Now, a fouled anchor is a symbol," he said. "It means that a boat is in trouble. So our symbol is the caduceus, the ancient symbol of medicine, combined with the symbol for trouble. At the intersection where those two meet, that is where our work happens. That is our job." ""
This is a very engaging book on the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the CDC... covers many current persistent and emerging infectious diseases and bioterrorism threats. Chapter 13 on SARS is also very interesting in relation to today's H5N1 threat...
Beating Back the Devil, On the Front Lines With the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, 2004, by Maryn McKenna (the same person who did the CIDRAP vaccine series) She has a chapter on the 1972 battle against smallpox in Bangladesh.
""By October of 1974, smallpox was confined to only two areas of Bangladesh. But fall was monsoon season: The country was struck with the worst floods in fifty years. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the low-lying areas near the coast and riverbanks, heading for the cities. Three months later, the government destroyed the slums the refugees had created, forcing them to return to their villages with bulldozers at their backs.
Smallpox traveled with them. The disease exploded across the country, unerringly finding the percentage of the population who remained susceptible. The president declared a national emergency. WHO poured staff into the crisis. By November 1975, Foster and his eradicators had not seen a case of smallpox for two months. on November 14, they declared victory over smallpox in Bangladesh.""
and from the conclusion...
""The closest thing to a rite of passage is the annual EIS Conference, the four-day gathering in April that has not changed substantially since Alex Langmuir staged the first one in 1952.
Almost 900 alumni still worked at the CDC, so it was easy for them to come to the meeting. Others had made careers in state health departments, academic medicine, public health school faculties, and hospital staffs. They had spread out to 49 states and 40 countries, with a substantial contingent in Geneva at the WHO.
"There's a tremendous esprit de corps that builds up," said Ralph Henderson, a physician who joined the EIS in 1965, worked in Africa, and then was loaned to the WHO for most of his career. He had returned to Atlanta in retirement, where he was designing an EIS-like program for the WHO.
They graduated, if they left the CDC, into an ad hoc network that stayed engaged with the agency, understood how it operated, and was almost uniformly loyal to it.
"These people are in touch; they're all out there networking with each other," Henderson went on. "The institution becomes far more effective because it's go hands and eyes everywhere."
From Rear Admiral Clinton's remarks to the 2002 EIS graduating officers...
He gestured to the gold banner behind him, next to the U.S. flag. It bore the 205-year-old symbol of the Public Health Service; a caduceus, the millennia-old sign of the healing professions, crossed over an anchor wound about with a heavy chain.
"Now, a fouled anchor is a symbol," he said. "It means that a boat is in trouble. So our symbol is the caduceus, the ancient symbol of medicine, combined with the symbol for trouble. At the intersection where those two meet, that is where our work happens. That is our job." ""