Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

CDC Director: In the Shutdown, 'We Are Juggling Chainsaws'

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The CDC’s Emergency Operations Center in Atlanta, from which it monitors disease outbreaks around the world.
Left: Currently. Right: Before the shutdown began.

We’re now on the sixteenth day of the federal shutdown. As I write, the Senate has announced a deal to avoid a debt default and open the government. It remains to be seen whether that will work, or how fast. Yesterday, on Day 15, I had a long conversation with Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about what this shutdown has meant for his agency, its employees, and the health of Americans, and the world. I have lightly edited the conversation for clarity.

Maryn McKenna, WIRED: You’re on Day 15 of sending home 68 percent of your 13,000-person staff, in Atlanta and around the world. How is the CDC coping?

Thomas R. Frieden, CDC: Every day this goes on, it gets harder to manage. We’re used to juggling things at CDC, but this is like juggling chain saws.

We’ve got two-thirds of our staff out. The exempt staff, the ones who are here, are here just because of a happenstance of how they’re paid: They are people who are on multi-year money, or grant money, or people in the Commissioned Corps, the uniformed Public Health Service. Of the people who are furloughable, 95 percent are furloughed.

I walk through the offices and talk to the remaining staff to thank them for being here. A woman who was the only person on her floor said to me, “We have no idea what we’re missing right now.” For years people have asked me, ‘Do you sleep well, knowing all these terrible threats we face?” And I’ve always said, “I sleep great because I know we have fantastic staff on watch.” And now I’m not sleeping.

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News Round-Up: Food, Foodborne Illness, And Antibiotic Resistance In Food

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OK, still catching up. Today: food, foodborne illness, and antibiotic use and resistance in food — lots of news in a multi-item rundown. (Under normal circumstances, I’d give each of these items a post of its own; but since they all happened in the past few weeks, it seems better to note them and move on.)

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Terror and Bioterror: 9/11 to 10/4 (Part 4)

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This Tuesday, Oct. 4, marks the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the first deaths in the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks, the first successful, fatal bioterrorist attack in American history on American soil. The anthrax attacks were recognized in the midst of the grief and disquiet that swept the United States after the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks, and like those, they changed for good the US’s sense of its security and its role in the world.

The foot-soldiers of much of the government response to 9/11 and 10/4 were the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the rapid-reaction disease detectives of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In recognition of the anniversaries of the two attacks, I’ve been running excerpts from my book Beating Back the Devil about the little-known, behind the scenes disaster response work performed by the disease-detective corps.

Beating Back the Devil was written in 2004. In 2008, the FBI acknowledged that for several years, it had incorrectly pursued a government scientist named Steven Hatfill as a “person of interest” in the letter attacks. That same year, another government scientist named Bruce Ivins committed suicide as the FBI was preparing to name him their chief suspect. But that did not bring the story to an end; as Wired‘s Noah Schachtman reported earlier this year, serious doubts remain about the FBI’s actions and Ivins’ role.

But in October 2001, all of that lay in the future. The CDC’s disease detectives were enmeshed in the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombings, and turning their attention to mysterious illnesses in Florida, New York, and Washington, DC.

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Terror and Bioterror: 9/11 to 10/4 (Part 3)

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Between Sept. 11 and Oct. 4, 2001, the United States was paralyzed by fear: First of terrorism, from the World Trade Center attacks, and then of bioterrorism, because so many government planners believed a biowarfare attack would follow a conventional one. They were right. In this ongoing excerpt from Beating Back the Devil, a history of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, a team of young disease detectives fans out across New York City in the wake of Sept. 11, hunting for any signals of a bioterror epidemic and struggling to separate what they see from common illnesses and panicked false alarms. While they search, a victim of bioterror does turn up — but far from New York City, at the other end of the East Coast.
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Terror and Bioterror: 9/11 to 10/4 (Part 2)

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The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center permanently changed the landscape of New York City and the tenor of American society — and, at the same time, the jobs of the disease detectives of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who are called the Epidemic Intelligence Service. The EIS started in 1951 out of fears that soldiers serving in the Korean War would unknowingly be exposed to biological weapons, and bring the organisms home to cause stateside epidemics. That prediction turned out to be unfounded, and over the decades, the EIS — and the rest of the US government — allowed concerns over bioterror to drift to the bottom of their priority list. Sept. 11 yanked that concern back the top of the list again. Oct. 4, 2001 — the day the first case in the anthrax attacks was announced — proved just how realistic a fear it was.

To mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and 10/4, I’m running excerpts from Chapter 12 of my book Beating Back the Devil, which tells the story of the EIS’s involvement in both disasters. Part 1 told their experience on Sept. 11. In this excerpt, it’s now Sept. 12. New York City is devastated, US airspace is shut down, and the CDC is struggling with whom to deploy, and how.
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Terror and Bioterror: 9/11 to 10/4 (Part 1)

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Today, of course, marks the 10th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center. Everyone old enough to remember it has a story of that day. Here’s mine: I was on my way to work as a newspaper reporter. I heard the news, turned my car around, gave my cat extra food, and picked up spare clothes and flat shoes. Later, I heard that two of my cousins, and two acquaintances, were missing. By dusk, I learned my cousins had walked across a bridge into Queens, part of an ash-covered tide of refugees. By midnight, I knew my acquaintances were dead.

So let me tell you, instead, some other peoples’ stories of that day and what came after: the terrorism first, and then the fears of a bioterror attack to follow; the relief when no epidemic appeared, and then the sinking shock when it did. The disease detectives of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were at the center of that month of horror and confusion. Between now and Oct. 4, the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the anthrax attacks, I’ll run excerpts from Chapter 12 of my book Beating Back the Devil, about the disease detectives — the Epidemic Intelligence Service — of the CDC.

We begin in Atlanta, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

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Q&A With Contagion's Science Advisor (Plus Spoilers!)

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If you are a disease geek, then yes, you will love Contagion, the all-star Oh God Oh God We’re All Going To Die movie that opened last night. Paramyxovirus! R-nought! BSL-4! And, bonus, so many insider references to the CDC that the script could double as an epidemiology drinking game. (Go to the end of this post for my fact-check of CDC references. They’re spoilery and thus hidden on the next page.)

To me, the fascinating thing about Contagion is how seriously it takes its epidemiology, its virology and even its sober sense of how unprepared most Americans are for a mass-casualty disaster (as captured in this April report from the National Biosurveillance Advisory Committee).

To find out where those came from, I asked its chief science adviser: Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, who is the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology, and Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, dubbed a “master virus-hunter” by master science-writer Carl Zimmer in the New York Times. Here’s our email Q & A.

Maryn: Given past “science” movies — Outbreak, for instance — I was surprised that the science in this movie is so solid. Was this your doing, and how did you manage it?

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