Since its founding in 1951 by Alexander Langmuir as a service/training program, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, working out of the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, has sent out more than 3,000 officers to combat every imaginable human (and sometimes animal) ailment.
These young people -- doctors, veterinarians, dentists, statisticians, nurses, microbiologists, academic epidemiologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and now even lawyers -- call themselves "shoeleather epidemiologists." EIS officers have ventured over the globe in search of diseases, sometimes in airplanes or jeeps, on bicycles, aboard fragile boats, on dogsleds, atop elephants and camels.
EIS officers generally have performed their tasks without fanfare or notice. They have saved uncountable lives, preventing uncontrolled spread of disease and diagnosing problems before they escalated.
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They even may have saved your life, though you were probably unaware of it. And in October 2001, they became deeply involved with containing the spread of anthrax in the United States.
On October 3, the Florida state laboratory called the CDC about a likely anthrax case. A disoriented, feverish 63-year-old man named Bob Stevens had entered a Boca Raton hospital the day before, and then had a seizure. His spinal fluid had just tested positive for Bacillus anthracis.
The next day the CDC lab confirmed the diagnosis. Stevens, a photo editor at the tabloid the Sun, was suffering from inhalational anthrax, a rare, deadly disease. There had been only 18 such cases in the United States during the 20th century, and the last had occurred 25 years before.
On October 4 a CDC team, led by EIS alum Brad Perkins and including five EIS officers, flew to Boca Raton. There they joined Florida-based EIS officer Marc Traeger.
Coming so soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the unusual inhalational anthrax case caused understandable concern, but the CDC investigators thought it unlikely to be bioterrorism. Why would terrorists pick on one obscure photo editor at an insignificant tabloid?
At 4 p.m. on Friday, Bob Stevens died. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration tried to control and centralize communication, so CDC director Jeff Koplan was effectively muzzled, while HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, who knew little about medicine, gave a press conference. He asserted that Stevens may have contracted anthrax by drinking from a North Carolina stream. "We cringed when we heard Thompson's comments," Traeger said. No one could get inhalational anthrax from contaminated water.
On Saturday CDC's Sherif Zaki arrived in Florida to perform the autopsy on Stevens, then returned to Atlanta along with all the environmental and clinical samples collected thus far. At 6:25 p.m. on Sunday, October 7, Perkins and the Florida CDC team were eating dinner at a cheap Italian restaurant. "We were feeling pretty good," recalls Josh Jones. "We had worked hard and had found nothing of real concern."
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