The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was originally organized in Atlanta in 1946, in the downtown location of the wartime Malaria Control in War Areas office. It was intended from the beginning to be a peacetime, civil organization under the U.S. Public Health Service, with no formal ties to the military. From its original task to eradicate malaria from the southeastern U.S., especially around the many military bases training men for the war effort, it moved in the late 1940s into investigating disease outbreaks and disseminating information about them to health practitioners. With some threats of biological warfare breaking out during the Korean War in the early 1950s, the CDC shifted some focus to addressing those potential problems as well as monitoring potential outbreaks of natural diseases. Emory University offered the CDC space on its campus along Clifton Road, giving the young agency room to expand its operations and laboratories there in the late 1950s.
Three high profile efforts gave the CDC its reputation as an effective protector of the public health. In the mid-1950s, its labs identified problems with contaminated Salk vaccines that were causing illnesses in children, and ran the fix to the immunization program. That same decade, a widespread outbreak of influenza was prevented from becoming a pandemic largely as a result of the CDC’s development of the first influenza vaccine. Then, starting in 1962, CDC researchers and field scientists set up a monitoring, containment and vaccine program that ended up eradicating the worlds most virulent and lethal disease, smallpox. By late 1977, for the first time in human history, no cases were found of smallpox anywhere in the world, and the disease was declared eliminated in 1979. Smallpox was thought to have originated in the earliest human populations, and was responsible for upwards of 500 million deaths in just the 20th century alone. While other diseases had a higher mortality rate than smallpox’s 60-80 percent rate, none had more longevity and spread among differing populations than the Variola major virus, the formal name of the most common type of smallpox.
By the late 1990s, with the rise of Islamic terrorism and its potential use of biological weapons against civilian populations, the CDC partly returned to its military roots, working on programs with its Defense Department counterparts to prepare for such attacks. One of the specific areas of research in this antiterrorism effort was highly controversial both inside and outside the agency. With the elimination of the smallpox threat, researchers had been divided on what to do with the remaining samples of live variola. In the 1990s, the World Health Organization, or WHO, had organized an effort to concentrate all the known samples in only two locations in the world, the Maximum Containment Laboratory at the CDC and the Russian State Center for Research on Virology and Biotechnology, in Koltsovo, Russia, and had begun talks about the advisability of destroying those stockpiles as well. The last samples of the tiny Variola, the biggest killer of mankind since ages immemorial, would hopefully end up as ghosts in those laboratories, faint echoes of the most perfect killing machines ever created.
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, It Happened in Atlanta, which is available for pre-order now at Amazon.com.
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