Word: cdc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Each year the CDC accepts 60 or so people involved in health care for a two-year tour of duty with the EIS. "We look for the bright, somewhat aggressive independent thinker," says Dr. Lyle Conrad, head of the division's field service officers. About half are based in Atlanta; the rest are assigned to public health departments around the country, with which the CDC works closely. All are on call 24 hours a day, ready to go wherever a disease breaks out, be it food poisoning or a case of primary pneumonic plague that appeared in 1980 in California...
...addition to the 1,000 requests for help that come from state and local agencies each year, the CDC undertakes about 50 projects overseas. Recent examples: tackling a polio epidemic in Indonesia meningitis in Upper Volta, malaria in Zanzibar, toxic reaction to polluted cooking oil in Spain and observing an immunization program against childhood diseases in China. Dr. Bess Miller, 35, was exhausted from working on the AIDS epidemic last year when the phone at home rang one evening. "My first thought was that they wanted to send me somewhere," she recalls. They did. Soon she was in the Israeli...
...CDC's most sophisticated facility is its Maximum Containment Laboratory, which handles highly lethal diseases that have no known antidotes. Workers, all of whom are volunteers, must punch in a code to open the outer shell of the lab; after a trip through a chemical-shower chamber, they must provide another personal number to gain access to the pressurized inner sanctum. There the scientists wear seamless blue space suits, equipped with their own air filtration systems, to work with some of the world's most lethal microbes, including those that cause Lassa fever and Ebola virus, two maladies that produce...
...Other CDC experts work with Immigration and Naturalization Service officials to prevent exotic diseases from entering the country. Laboratory Director Joseph McCormick, who studied Lassa fever in Sierra Leone, sped to the Atlanta airport in a four-wheel-drive vehicle during a snowstorm last January to pick up a mysteriously ailing passenger from Nigeria. The man was placed in an isolation room until it was certain he was not suffering from one of the deadly viruses...
...case that made the CDC known to the public at large remains a classic in the annals of medical detective work. In July 1976, Pennsylvania chapters of the American Legion held a rollicking convention at Philadelphia's Bellevue Stratford Hotel. In the next few days, eleven Pennsylvanians died, apparently of pneumonia; a Legion officer alerted health authorities that the victims all had attended the convention. A phone call was made to Atlanta for help. Late that night, Dr. Theodore Tsai, an EIS officer, arrived in the state health office, carrying a cooler, to collect blood samples and respiratory secretions...