Not my posting, but from someone I know. I also fit some of these examples below and had the honor of working with the same people. And by no means is the CDC the only agency that does amazing, critical work. Please share stories like this from your agency. Too long have civil servants just ignored the slandar and lies politicians used to stir up their base. We just focused on the job carried. Well, because we were too busy doing actual work and the politicians that saw what we do were too scared to put out a counter-message, we are in the current situation. So, take the time to help tell our stories and educate the public, because otherwise, people won't know until it is too late.
DO YOU LOVE TO HATE THAT “DREADFUL, BLOATED, WOKE, BUREAUCRACY” NAMED CDC?
These true stories from friends I knew and worked with at CDC during my 22 years there might just change your mind:
Remember the dreaded “TOXIC SHOCK SYNDROME” that can kill as many three out of every ten people who get it? My friend Dr. Claire Broome, helped discover that it was often making women sick who were not properly using tampons.
How about the dreaded LEGIONNAIRE’S DISEASE that can kill one in every ten people who contract it. My friend, Dr. Joe McDade tells of the joy he and his fellow CDC colleagues felt when they discovered the cause: a hotel air conditioning cooling tower where the Legionnaires had gathered for a meeting - the kind of cooling tower at every major hotel where you and I now safely stay.
When you click in that secure AUTOMOBILE SAFETY BELT next time you drive, thank CDC for collecting and summarizing the data from auto accidents that showed how many lives seatbelts save each year - estimated to be 15,000 lives in 2017 alone.
Remember how we hated losing LEAD IN GASOLINE? For years people thought that lead poisoning mostly came from lead in peeling paint, until CDC was able to show Congress that lead in gasoline was poisoning all children and lowering their IQs in the process. So Congress passed a law restricting lead in gas. But lead was a great, cheap lubricator that kept the car engines of the day from knocking; so industry lobbyists had almost succeeded in convincing Congress to allow more lead back in gas…….until the night before the bill was to pass. That night CDC showed undeniable data that the law reducing lead in gas had reduced the average lead contamination in U.S. children every year since the original law had passed. So Congress, reversed itself and actually restricted lead in gas even further! Lead contamination in ALL U.S. children - rich and poor, urban and rural, black and white (the ‘Public” CDC was created to serve) dropped so much that it was estimated to raise the IQ of an average U.S. child by 10 points!!
How did CDC get its data? For more than 50 years a very small number of MOBILE CDC HEALTH CLINICS have traveled the country offering free physicals to volunteers, who understand that in exchange for free physicals, their blood samples - disconnected from their names- would be collected, stored and studied in future years. This program has created a treasure trove of health data that is the envy of countries around the world. These samples give a clear picture of how the average American’s health has been impacted by lifestyle choices, and environmental exposure. Are you worrying about some ‘youtuber’s’ alarming message that some new chemical is making us all sick? CDC and universities across the country can study current and past blood samples and can sometimes associate an increase in a certain disease, with the introduction of some new chemical leading to warnings about its use. But other studies can and do also, at times, put people’s mind at ease by showing that some new chemical has not been absorbed in people’s blood and shouldn’t be banned or worried about. It’s literally science at work.
Remember hearing in the news a few years ago about parents in TIMES BEACH, MO worrying that their children had been exposed to DIOXIN that had been illegally sprayed on the roads of trailer parks to hold down dust. I remember going to public hearings where the Highway Patrol was holding back angry crowds of parents who wanted to know whether their kids would die of cancer. At the time we had to tell them that the only way to know for sure whether their child had absorbed dioxin was to painfully slice a large piece of adipose tissue from their child’s hip and run a somewhat unreliable lab test. Within weeks, CDC had developed a simple and much more accurate test that could be made by simply drawing a sample of the child’s blood. Problem solved.
FOOD RECALLS Have you ever thrown away meat or fruit or vegetables that have been recalled? It’s often because CDC has discovered a link between people getting sick and dying and their having eaten at a certain restaurant chain or eaten meat from a certain packing plant or grapes from some South American farm. How’s that work? Well, physicians and labs are required to report and send to CDC lab samples of every case of certain reportable diseases known to kill people. CDC compiles and studies that data and when it sees that people in a certain area of the country are sick or dying from the same illness, they begin interviewing people about where and what they ate. They can trace an illness to a certain restaurant, or grocery store, and even meat sold in that store that came from a certain packing plant. It’s impossible to calculate the lives saved from these recalls that happen all the time and silently protect us from illness and death.
Remember the panic we felt in this country when someone died in a Texas hospital from just one - yes one- EBOLA case that had been imported from Africa. Catching Ebola at that time was an almost certain death sentence causing a person to die within just a few days bleeding from every oriface in their body. CDC’s then director, Dr. Tom Frieden, saw the disease spreading like wildfire in the West African countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. He predicted that international travel would import the dreaded disease to the U.S. unless CDC helped stop it over there. He asked for CDC volunteers to leave their safe labs and research facilities in Atlanta and volunteeer to travel to West Africa, and risk exposing themselves to this deadly disease to help contain the disease; so it couldn’t come here. 2,000 - yes 2,000 - CDC staff volunteered and did go over and helped stop the disease in its tracks. They did so knowing that if they hopped in a taxi there that had just transported a sick, sweating ebola victim to a hospital, that a simple scratch on their hand on the seat of the taxi could mean certain death. I had one friend kiss his 12-year old daughter goodby as he dropped her off on her first day of school, and then boarded an airplane to go fight Ebola, knowing there was a chance he would never see her again. I have a picture of another friend who left her air-conditioned, bio-safety level four lab in Atlanta. She is working in full protective garb, in 100 degree weather, in a makeshift lab that was a steel cargo container. Other CDC friends, - young women - slept on open spring beds on the floor of a rat infested, abandoned home, while working to contain the disease. These ‘bureaucrats’ are likely some of the same 2,000 CDC staff that were summarily fired on Tuesday of this week.
Remember the sad news a couple of weeks ago about Gene Hackman’s wife dying from HANTAVIRUS? Years ago CDC was called on to investigate what was killing so many native americans living in the southwest. They discovered that as people were sweeping their floors clean from rodent droppings, they were aerosolyzing and then breathing in Hantavirus. With proper prevention, problem solved.
People often die from deadly HOSPITAL-ACQUIRED INFECTIONS they catch while in the hospital for other reasons. Hospitals of course never advertise that they have an antibiotic resistant disease problem, but they can quietly seek CDC’s help in finding and solving the problem. In one case years ago, patients kept dying from infections acquired in certain operating suites in a hospital. Despite fully disinfecting the suites after each surgery, and despite none of the surgical suite staff showing any symptoms of infection, patients continued to die. An article several years ago in National Geographic magazine documented how CDC solved the problem. CDC came in and had staff run in place in the middle of a circle of petri dishes on the floor. One of the surgical suite nurses ‘lit up’ every petri dish as her body threw off antibiotic resistant disease germs. Problem solved. It’s impossible to know how many lives in how many hospitals have been saved by CDC’s efforts to find and solve difficult cases of hospital-acquired infections.
I remember as a young man meeting a retired Minister of Health from some South American country who told me, “Son, you think you know CDC, but but you don’t begin to understand its importance. It’s an accepted fact among Ministers of Health around the world that, If they have a health problem they can’t solve, and only one place to go for help, it will ALWAYS be CDC.’’ A few years later I learned that the Minister of Health for PANAMA had called CDC saying, “I’m about to be fired because children down here are getting sick and dying, but only if they enter the hospital - and I can’t discover why this is happening.” CDC asked for lab samples. A CDC scientist met the plane on the runway at 2:00 in the morning, ran the samples to a CDC lab, and by early that same morning CDC had discovered the problem. The Panamanian hospital was using a Chinese-manufactured generic form of liquid Tylenol to treat fevers in kids. The problem: the liquid had accidentally been sweetened with a poisonous form of anti-freeze. The problem was solved not just for Panama, but likelly for hospitals in this country who might have ordered that same contaminated product.
THERE IS A REASON WHY SO MANY FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS, INCLUDING CHINA, HAVE A PREVENTIVE HEALTH ORGANIZATION CALLED ‘CDC’ - EVEN THOUGH ‘CDC’ MEANS NOTHING IN THEIR LANGUAGE. It’s because they so deeply admire, respect, and want to emulate the life saving work of the world’s most renowned and successful preventive health organization: The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC.