Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION
CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION (CDC), located in Atlanta, Georgia, is the largest federal agency outside the Washington, D.C., area, with more than eighty-five hundred employees and a budget of $4.3 billion for nonbioterrorism-related activities and another $2.3 billion for its emergency and bioterrorism programs (2002). Part of the U.S. Public Health Service, the CDC was created in 1946 as successor to the World War II organization Malaria Control in War Areas. Originally called the Communicable Disease Center, it soon outgrew its narrow focus, and its name was changed in 1970 to Center (later Centers) for Disease Control. The words "and Prevention" were added in 1993, but the acronym CDC was preserved.
During the Cold War, the CDC created the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) to guard against biological warfare, but quickly broadened its scope. The "disease detectives," as EIS officers came to be known, found the cause for the outbreak of many diseases, including Legionnaires' disease in 1976 and toxic shock syndrome in the late 1970s. In 1981, the CDC recognized that a half dozen cases of a mysterious illness among young homosexual men was the beginning of an epidemic, subsequently called AIDS. The CDC also played a leading role in the elimination of smallpox in the world (1965–1977), a triumph based on the concept of surveillance, which was perfected at the CDC and became the basis of public health practice around the world. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the CDC led the nation's immunization crusades against polio, measles, rubella, and influenza, and made major contributions to the knowledge of family planning and birth defects. Critics have faulted the CDC for its continuance of a study of untreated syphilis at Tuskegee, Alabama (1957–1972), and for a massive immunization effort against swine influenza in 1976, an epidemic that never materialized.
The CDC assumed an expanded role in maintaining national security after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and the subsequent discovery of deadly anthrax spores in the U.S. mail system. Responding to fears of biological, chemical, or radiological attacks, the CDC initiated new preparedness and response programs, such as advanced surveillance, educational sessions for local public health officials, and the creation of a national pharmaceutical stockpile to inoculate the public against bioterrorist attacks.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Etheridge, Elizabeth W. Sentinel for Health: A History of the Centers for Disease Control. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Elizabeth W.Etheridge/a. r.
See alsoAcquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) ; Epidemics and Epidemiology ; Medical Research ; Medicine and Surgery ; Terrorism .