The Epidemic Intelligence Service
Today’s CDC is known for assisting U.S. state health departments and other countries’ ministries of health during local outbreaks and emergency responses. While the malaria control program set precedent for this practice, the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) improved CDC’s ability to support states. Dr. Alexander D. Langmuirexternal icon created the EIS program in 1951 to aid the states in the control of communicable disease.
At its inception, the EIS program was part of the U.S. government’s efforts to detect biological warfare during the Korean War, but its success in detecting outbreaks led to it continuing today. Now, it’s a 2-year training program for health professionals interested in the practice of
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Baby boomers remember both the fear of poliomyelitis the viral infection that attacks the nervous system, leaving some who contract it paralyzed, or dead and the relief that they felt when the rollout of Jonas Salk’s vaccine put an end to repeated midcentury summer outbreaks of the disease. In 1954, the summer before this rollout, 1.8 million kids participated in a widely publicized trial of the new vaccine. From the vantage point of 2020, when vaccine skepticism floats right below the surface of public debate, the widespread embrace of the new vaccine feels surprising. Was the March of Dimes–financed rollout of Salk’s miracle jab, conducted in a hurry as polio threatened to strike again in the summer of 1955, really as smooth as history makes it seem?
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President Biden receives his second dose of the coronavirus vaccine from Ric Cuming, chief nurse executive, at ChristianaCare Christiana Hospital in Newark, Del. Jan. 11.
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We’re full-throttle into mass distribution of covid-19 vaccines. And let there be no doubt, their rapid development is an extraordinary achievement. I want to underscore that by revisiting what I wrote here last spring, when I placed President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed into historical context looking particularly at the polio vaccine pioneered by Dr. Jonas Salk at Pitt.
Dr. Edward Jenner performing his first smallpox vaccination on James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy. May 14, 1796.
Jan. 28 With just 15 million Americans having been administered vaccine against COVID-19 to this date and far, far fewer even in many developed countries the success of the COVID-19 vaccination drive depends on more than production and distribution rates and public health systems. It also needs what seems, in the United States, to be a scarce virtue among its citizens: commitment to the General Welfare.
The words are capitalized in the great Preamble to the United States Constitution as one of the primary concerns of “We, the People.” No disease is or has been
Originally published on December 27, 2020 7:38 am
Editor s Note: As this year winds down, we re looking back at some people we spoke to earlier in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was in its early stages. Now
that there s a vaccine, we wanted to check in with someone whose family has a long history with vaccines.
When I spoke to Dr. Peter Salk back in May, he told me the tale of receiving an early polio vaccine - the one invented by his father, Dr. Jonas Salk. I just hated injections. And my father came home with polio vaccine and some syringes and needles that he sterilized on the kitchen stove by boiling in water, lined us kids up and then administered the vaccine, Salk said. Somehow the needle must have missed a nerve, and I didn t feel it. And so that has fixed that moment in my mind.