Detail Source
Name : Martin Stuart Cetron / [Cetron Martin] / [Martin Ceteron] / [Martin S Centron]
Birth Date : Feb 1956
Residence : 1994-2020 / 2514 Echo Dr Ne / Atlanta, Georgia, USA / 30345
Second Residence : 1997-2015 / 3401 Winding Oaks Dr / Longboat Key, Florida, USA / 34228
Third Residence : 1989-1998 / 1712 Ne 68th St / Seattle, Washington, USA / 98115
Fourth : 1994-1996 / 2606 Glenrose Hl / Atlanta, Georgia, USA / 30341
By Andrew C. Revkin / Aug. 8, 2000
2000-08-08-nytimes-clues-to-an-alien-virus-scientists-begin-to-crack-the-mysteries-of-west-nile.pdf
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West Nile virus appears to be settling in for the long haul.
Almost one year after the Western Hemisphere debut of the virus sent 62 people to hospitals, eventually killing 7 of them with severe brain inflammation, the bird-carried, mosquito-transmitted disease has struck again, infecting a 78-year-old man from Staten Island.
The man, who became ill last month before New York City began this year's round of mosquito spraying, recovered, as the vast majority of infected people do.
But despite widespread spraying, many scientists expect that a scattering of such cases and a few deaths, mostly in the elderly or infirm, may well become the norm in years to come.
More slowly than expected, but steadily, the globe-hopping virus is dispersing from last year's focal point in northern Queens, leaving a trail of dead birds that so far extends north to Boston, west to Syracuse and south to Maryland.
According to virus experts, this pattern indicates that West Nile, which was first identified in Uganda in 1937 and flares up sporadically in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, appears ensconced in the New World.
Since last fall, dozens of scientists have been scrambling to understand West Nile's origin and destiny as it explores this continent and tests new hosts, decimating some, like crows, leaving others, like pigeons, untouched, and occasionally spilling over into people. Thousands of hours of sleuthing, testing and analysis are only now offering preliminary clues. The big questions are largely unresolved.
How did the virus get here? Where did it come from? What is its main animal reservoir -- the birds in which it can simmer in sufficient concentrations to be passed by mosquitoes from one host to another? How far will it spread?
Most important, will West Nile pose a major threat to public health in the United States? The answer to this question, at least so far, appears to be no.
Where there are answers, they are couched in caveats:
Though the virus was first identified in Uganda, the source of the outbreak here was probably Israel; the American strain is almost indistinguishable from a virulent strain found in a goose on an Israeli farm in 1998.
House sparrows -- ubiquitous, dust-colored, one-ounce crumb-snatchers -- are probably a principal reservoir here; new tests at federal laboratories show they can harbor the virus for five days or more at levels high enough to infect mosquitoes that bite them.
Beyond that, little is known.
Given the lack of knowledge about what conditions set off the virus's spread to people, spraying near spots where birds died, the major response so far, is akin to shooting at an assailant in the dark, many scientists say. ''But at least it gives you something to do,'' said Dr. Vincent Deubel, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who has studied West Nile outbreaks for 15 years.
For now, scientists investigating West Nile say one thing is clear: surveillance and spraying can help cut the risk that people will be infected, but the virus is probably here to stay and will continue to spread.
''We're beyond containment now,'' said Robert G. McLean, a government biologist studying West Nile's effect on birds. ''We have to live with it and do the best we can.''
The closest thing to a fact in the investigation of the disease, scientists say, is that it is truly new in the Americas, arriving somewhere around New York City in the months before last summer's outbreak.
Blood tests in people and birds showed the kind of immune response typical when a body is freshly exposed to an infection, according to federal health officials. Mapping of test results for captured house sparrows -- which do not migrate -- show a hump in the exposure rate in and around Queens and nowhere else.
And crows, the most vulnerable birds, are almost nowhere to be seen in northern Queens this summer. The population there crashed 90 percent, federal scientists say, while in other areas the birds were hit less hard.
West Nile virus is closely related to several other mosquito-borne viruses found around the world, including Japanese encephalitis virus and St. Louis encephalitis, which has a similar cycle in birds and mosquitoes and occasionally strikes people across the South and Middle West.
One big difference is that St. Louis encephalitis is ''silent'' in birds, generally not killing them, scientists say, so there is usually no warning before a human case. For West Nile, at least the American strain, birds, and particularly crows, offer a hint of possible trouble to come.
The disease has caused epidemics in the past. In West Nile outbreaks in Israel in the 1950's, South Africa in 1974 and Romania in 1996, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people became ill, with 5 percent to 10 percent of those cases proving fatal.
But far greater numbers of people bitten by infected mosquitoes never know they have been exposed.
Over all, scientists say, human illness from the virus is likely to remain rare, a result of unusual confluences of mosquito-friendly weather, chance bird movements and other influences that cause the virus to ''amplify'' enough to pose a threat beyond its normal hosts.
Humans are always likely to remain what biologists call a ''dead-end host,'' one that can be infected, but whose immune system almost always prevents the virus from multiplying enough to be passed back to mosquitoes and then other hosts.
''It's horrible for the few individuals who've been terribly affected, but I don't see any way that it will cause more than a dribble of cases here,'' said Dr. Paul W. Ewald, an infectious disease expert at Amherst College.
Still, West Nile has already defied expectations here. So health officials want to be prepared, should it surprise them again.
Last fall, the surprise was pleasant. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an alert from New York to Texas, offering money to states to track what was expected to be a kind of rolling wave of dying birds as the annual southward migration took place and the virus tagged along.
But no southerly die-off was seen. And since then, the only new discoveries of birds with the virus have come to the north, not the south -- in Syracuse, and just outside of Boston.
In New York City, health officials put a particular focus on watching for the virus in northern Queens, which was the clear hot zone last summer. This summer, if anything, it appears that Queens is a cold zone.
Staten Island has been a hot spot, and in late July, West Nile popped up in the heart of Manhattan, forcing the abrupt cancellation of a New York Philharmonic concert in Central Park when some trapped mosquitoes were found with the virus.
Of growing concern to some biologists is the virus's potential effect on American wild birds, including species like whooping cranes, eagles and ravens, which seem susceptible.
The imported West Nile strain, and the Israeli strain it most resembles, are more dangerous to birds than other known strains of the virus, said Dr. McLean of the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., which is run by the United States Geological Survey.
And the dead birds keep coming. In a telephone interview last Friday, Dr. McLean said a shipment of 25 bird carcasses had just come in from New York, ''and it's going to start picking up more and more.''
While trying to stay a step ahead of the virus, scientists are also looking back, trying to retrace how and why it finally found its way across the Atlantic Ocean now.
This could help change the way health officials guard against other so-called emerging diseases, said Dr. Martin Cetron, an epidemiologist in the federal centers' quarantine division in Atlanta, who is helping to direct the investigation.
A team based at the centers devised a mathematical model to test the probability of nearly every possibility -- ranging from a sick tourist returning from Tel Aviv to an infected goose to a mosquito confined eight or more hours in an airline cabin.
The team ended up with a top-10 list of probable sources, Dr. Cetron said, including mostly things like shipments of poultry or pet birds. Only one subset of people ranked in the top 10: travelers from Israel whose immune systems were weak enough to allow the virus to thrive long enough to be picked up by a New York mosquito and spread to birds and, eventually, back to people.
The research has not yet been published, so Dr. Cetron said he could not disclose details. But he did describe some remarkable statistics the team came upon, which show just how many possible carriers of the virus came to the New York region through the three major airports in the year leading up to the outbreak.
From July 1998 to June 1999, 5 million people arrived with the metropolitan region as their final destination. Of those, 2.1 million came from places where West Nile has been found.
There were shipments of imported birds, horses, even frogs, all of which can harbor the virus. More than one million live birds, mostly poultry, were imported in that span.
The numbers were only the beginning, Dr. Cetron said. The next step was winnowing the data for each suspect animal or human population based on two things: were they arriving from a place with the most similar strain of the virus, and what were the odds that they could have been harboring live virus in their blood when they got here?
Dr. Cetron stressed that the model was like a compass, pointing in a certain direction, but providing no firm answers.
Now that West Nile is here, what is it capable of? No one has found a formula predicting how it makes its leap to a human outbreak from the circumstances now seen in southern New York -- with a scattering of bird deaths, one human case and a few dozen samples of trapped mosquitoes carrying the virus.
But analysis of past outbreaks in temperate zones in its previous range shows some patterns. It is usually passed from birds to humans in late summer, in cities more than the countryside and in weather or in places that mosquitoes enjoy.
Some scientists say that conditions are not nearly as primed for a significant human outbreak as they were last year. They note that frequent downpours this summer in the New York metropolitan area are likely to have flushed storm drains that were stagnant last year because of a prolonged drought. Stagnant, nutrient-laden water is a welcome mat for Culex mosquitoes.
This year, too, many communities revived mosquito control efforts, including widespread use of larvicide, that had ended 10 or 20 years ago for lack of concern.
Even with all the surveillance and spraying and larviciding under way now, many scientists said, it is likely that when the disease spills into people, it will come as a surprise.
For St. Louis encephalitis, the infection rate in mosquitoes generally has to reach about 1 in 1,000 for the virus to become a threat to people, experts say, adding that a similar ratio is expected for West Nile. But it is almost impossible to trap enough mosquitoes to detect when this threshold has been reached in a particular place, they say.
And, ultimately, scientists just do not know whether West Nile, in its new terrain, will play by established rules. ''We don't have the luxury of a track record,'' said Roger S. Nasci, a mosquito expert in the disease-control centers' laboratories at Fort Collins, Colo.
On the front lines in New York, scientists are racing to keep up with a rising flow of dead birds. In his laboratory near Albany, Dr. Ward B. Stone, the state's wildlife pathologist, conducts triage on a steady flow of crows, herons, hawks, bluejays and other birds, quickly assessing which should be sent on for tests for the new virus and which were killed by conventional causes.
''From mid-August until after Labor Day, we're going to see this virus amplifying,'' Dr. Stone said.
He said that he had no doubt that the current frenzied focus on West Nile would eventually ebb, and that it would be added to the growing list of diseases on the fringe -- never as familiar as flu, rabies or meningitis, but something always to consider when a bird dies, or an elderly man spikes a fever in the summertime.
''It will become one of the diseases in America that we have to watch for,'' Dr. Stone said. ''And we should be getting ready for the next one.''
July 2002
Clinical Infectious Diseases 35(1):110-110
Authors:
Article history
Received: 05 November 2001
Revision received: 03 January 2002
Published: 15 May 2002
2002-07-clinical-infectious-diseases-yellow-fever-prevention-monath-cetron.pdf
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Health and airline officials testified about aircraft cabin environments and air quality standards in commercial airlines. Among the topics they addressed were potential transmission of infectious diseases, occupational health concerns for airline crews, and the recent global outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). close
https://www.c-span.org/video/?176910-1/airline-cabin-air-quality
Deputy Director
National Center of Infectious Diseases->Migration and Quarentine
By David Tuller / Dec. 9, 2003
2003-12-09-nytimes-if-sars-hits-us-quarantine-could-too.pdf
As the health officer of Alameda County, Dr. Anthony Iton is prepared to make tough choices if SARS re-emerges this winter or spring, as many infectious disease experts fear.
The county, just across the bay from here, has identified two large buildings where, if voluntary steps to quell an epidemic were to fail, the authorities could sequester not just people who were sick but also people who might have been exposed to the SARS virus, Dr. Iton said.
The buildings, he said, could house up to 100 people and could be guarded to keep anyone from leaving.
''It's a virtual certainty that sometime in the near future we will see a SARS-like event in the United States, a highly communicable infectious disease that will require mass quarantine or isolation,'' Dr. Iton said.
Since last spring's outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, public health officials across the country have been spending extraordinary amounts of time and energy preparing for the prospect that the disease -- or pandemic flu, smallpox or something as yet unknown -- could require them to order a quarantine, a once common public health measure virtually abandoned for most of the past century.
In a draft SARS preparedness plan released this fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises states and communities to impose restrictions on people's movements based on the severity of an outbreak. In the event of a quarantine, the plan envisions extensive tracing of contacts of SARS patients, combined with a largely home-based, voluntary regime.
The plan, however, also calls for health authorities to cooperate closely with law enforcement, and to consider in extreme cases ''electronic forms of monitoring,'' ''detention facilities'' and the establishment of heavily guarded quarantine ''zones.'' It also calls for respecting civil liberties and keeping the public informed.
Patrick Libbey, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said the health authorities in many jurisdictions had been identifying possible buildings and preparing for possible outbreaks.
''People are taking this question absolutely seriously,'' Mr. Libbey said. ''With the SARS outbreak, it really sharpened the focus on nuts-and-bolts planning.''
Some issues facing health officials, Mr. Libbey added, concern legal processes for imposing quarantines, ways to house people and manage their needs, and the financing of such undertakings.
In New York City, the authorities have revised the health code to make sure they can legally quarantine people not just for known diseases but for suddenly emerging ones that present a major health threat, said [Dr. Marcelle C. Layton (born 1958)], who is the city's assistant commissioner of communicable disease at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Dr. Layton and officials in other cities and states are discussing how they would provide food, medical care and psychological support to people placed under quarantine, whether at home or in a government-monitored building.
''Our preference would be for people to stay at home,'' Dr. Layton said, echoing Dr. Iton of Alameda. ''But we need alternatives in case people aren't compliant, and we've had teams identifying the kinds of facilities we might use.''
Until the advent of advances like antibiotics and routine vaccinations, quarantine was a widely used -- and sometimes abused -- method of controlling the spread of infectious diseases. While often effective, it was also applied disproportionately against immigrants, racial minorities and people in lower socioeconomic groups. And the word itself can still summon images of medieval plagues and of people abandoned to their fate on boats and islands and in fenced-off parts of a town.
Today's public health authorities remain intensely aware of the historical baggage. ''You've got to own up to all of the demons, the fears that have evolved from quarantine's misuse,'' said Dr. Martin Cetron, a quarantine specialist at the disease control agency. ''We're talking about a balance between a public health tool and a limitation on individual rights.
''The key is to get that balance as delicately aligned as possible, so that you have a minimum infringement on civil liberties but the maximum effect in quenching or preventing an epidemic.''
These days, public health officials clearly distinguish between what they call isolation, reserved for those already found to have the disease in question and who are under care, and quarantine, which involves restricting the movement of people who have been exposed to an infected individual and may -- or may not -- become sick themselves. The authorities say they will never lump together those who are ill and others only thought to be exposed, as happened frequently in past quarantines.
If those under quarantine were to remain free of symptoms until the end of the incubation period, they would be free to go. If they were to develop symptoms, they would be treated and isolated from those remaining in quarantine to minimize the possibility of infecting others.
Many health authorities credit the use of both isolation and quarantine -- mostly at home or at health care complexes -- with preventing an even worse epidemic of SARS this year in places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Canada.
In Toronto, the epicenter of the Canadian epidemic, thousands of asymptomatic people were asked to remain at home for about 10 days, the generally accepted incubation period for SARS. Almost all agreed, and health officials, who telephoned regularly to monitor their compliance and medical condition, were forced to issue formal quarantine orders in only a few cases.
Because SARS is considered transmissible only once someone has developed symptoms, the families of those quarantined at home were not considered to be at risk.
''The human cost of doing this was obviously large,'' said Dr. Paul Gully, a senior director general at Health Canada, the main agency overseeing health care. ''People basically couldn't go to work, they couldn't go to school, they couldn't socialize. It stopped their lives for 10 days. But people were very concerned about the spread of this disease, so they were willing to accept it.''
But in Singapore, with its more authoritarian traditions, the state installed video cameras in quarantined people's homes and threatened to clamp on electronic bracelets if they did not show their faces at regular intervals.
Some people express alarm at talk of government-imposed quarantines, especially given current political tensions over civil liberties. While critics say they generally trust public health officials, they fear that political leaders and law enforcement authorities may actually call the shots if a quarantine is imposed.
''The existence of emergency powers in the hands of the government just makes it more likely that the government is going to overreact,'' said Dr. George Annas, chairman of the health law department at Boston University.
Few dispute the state's authority to isolate people with an infectious disease like tuberculosis. In the United States, the small clusters of diagnosed and suspected cases of SARS were mostly kept isolated, sometimes against their will.
But the quarantine of suspected contacts, who may or may not become ill themselves, is much more contentious. Federal health officials say the largely voluntary compliance in Canada and other countries suggests that American will comply, but others are not so sure.
For one thing, critics say that an illness that is more virulent or has a longer incubation period than SARS will require a more severe form of quarantine.
''I think Americans will be more skeptical about quarantine proposals than Canadians are, and probably more anxious to exercise their legal rights,'' said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Program on Technology and Liberty. ''I think they will by and large cooperate, but we're going to want some proof that there's a genuine threat.''
States and some cities have the authority to impose emergency public health measures like quarantine. The federal government retains the power to police the nation's borders against disease and to act to prevent transmission between states. In April, President Bush signed an order adding SARS to the list of ''quarantinable'' diseases.
With guidance from a model statute proposed by the disease-control centers two years ago, many states have revised antiquated public health laws. They have both clarified their authority to take emergency measures and improved provisions that allow people to protest quarantine orders.
Mr. Steinhardt and other civil libertarians say that these due process protections are far from ironclad. But the problem, public health authorities argue, is that a framework must be flexible enough to be deployed against a spectrum of known and unknown diseases, each with its own treatment regimen, incubation period, mode of transmission and degree of infectiousness.
''One of the challenging policy aspects is what steps do you take, particularly steps that infringe on a person's rights, with a syndrome that is totally new or not clearly defined,'' Mr. Libbey said. ''The earlier the intervention, the fewer the subsequent infections.
''But how much information is enough to act on, short of an absolute and complete causal connection, before you get to the point at which it may be too late to intervene effectively and stop transmission?''
PMCID: PMC2259156
Copyright © 2005. All rights reserved.
Martin Cetrona and Julius Landwirthb
Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, Centers for Disease Control, and Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and Donaghue Initiative in Biomedical and Behavioral Research Ethics
Note the aexction on SOCIAL DISTANCING / SCHOOL CLOSURES .. Modeled in part on Larry Gostin's work ...
BULLET #5 - 5. Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities. The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act. Prepared by the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities. Washington, DC; December 21, 2001. Available at http://www.publichealthlaw.net/MSEHPA/MSEHPA2.pdf
DEFINITIONS
PRINCIPLES OF MODERN QUARANTINE
LEGAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Note .. in the Same issue ... (* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/issues/161862/ )
Robert A. Cook
Yale J Biol Med. 2005 Oct; 78(5): 343–353.
PMCID: PMC2259160
A1 : https://www.newspapers.com/image/660593906/
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A10 : https://www.newspapers.com/image/660593912/?terms=%22social%20distancing%22&match=1
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2005-11-23-nytimes-cdc-proposes-new-rules-in-effort-to-prevent-disease-outbreak.pdf
By Lawrence K. Altman / Nov. 23, 2005
Federal officials yesterday proposed the first significant changes in quarantine rules in 25 years in an effort to broaden the definition of reportable illnesses, to centralize their reporting to the federal government and to require the airline and shipping industries to keep passenger manifests electronically for 60 days.
The proposals would also clarify the appeals process for people subjected to quarantines to allow for administrative due process and give health officials explicit authority to offer vaccination, drugs and other appropriate means of prevention on a voluntary basis to those in quarantine.
The proposals could cost the beleaguered airline industry hundreds of millions of dollars, officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The officials are inviting public comment on the proposals, which are to be published in the Federal Register on Nov. 30, they told reporters in a telephone news conference.
The proposals are part of a broader Bush administration plan to improve the response to current and potential communicable disease threats that may arise anywhere in the world.
If adopted, the new regulations "will allow the C.D.C. to move more swiftly" when it needs to control outbreaks, said Dr. Martin Cetron, who directs the agency's division of global migration and quarantine.
The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 underscored how fast a disease could spread through the world and the need to modernize and strengthen quarantine measures by pointing out gaps in health workers' ability to respond quickly and effectively, Dr. Cetron said.
As the C.D.C. joined with cooperative airlines to meet flights and later collect information about passengers who had contact with others who developed SARS, the epidemiologists had to compile and process by hand data collected from flight manifests, customs declarations and other sources.
But manifests contained only the name and seat number; customs declarations were illegible, and when readable, the names did not match those on the manifests.
"The time required to track passengers was routinely longer than the incubation period," which was two to 10 days for SARS, Dr. Cetron said.
"That was really quite shocking," Dr. Cetron said.
One proposed change would require airline and ship manifests to be kept electronically for 60 days and made available to the C.D.C. within 12 hours when ill passengers arrive on international and domestic flights. The proposed changes include provisions for maintaining confidentiality and privacy of health information.
The outbreak of SARS was stopped in part because of quarantines imposed in some affected countries.
Quarantine restricts the movement of a healthy person exposed to someone who has a communicable disease. The quarantine period is determined by the usual length of time that passes from exposure to an infectious agent to the onset of illness.
An executive order of the president limits quarantine to nine diseases: cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola, SARS and influenza caused by new strains that could cause a pandemic.
Another proposed change would expand the definition of illnesses to include respiratory ailments like influenza. An ill person would be defined as having a temperature of 100.4 degrees or greater, accompanied by one or more of the following: rash, swollen lymph nodes, headache with neck stiffness (a sign of possible meningitis), and changes in level of consciousness or cognitive function.
Also, the definition of illness would include diarrhea , a fever that has persisted more than 48 hours, severe bleeding, jaundice, severe persistent cough, or respiratory distress.
Captains of airplanes and ships are now required to notify local health officials about an ill passenger or crew at the next port of call and take such measures as local officials direct.
The new proposals call for captains to bypass local health officials and report instead to the director of the C.D.C. through quarantine officials or e-mail messages. The C.D.C., in turn, would notify local health officials.
The proposals would allow airline officials flexibility in establishing a system that would include a written plan to ensure the reporting of ill passengers and deaths on board flights and submit it to the director within 90 days of the final publication of the rule. The airline would be given an additional 90 day period to put the plan into effect. Airlines would be required to have periodic drills to make sure the plans work.
With roughly half the domestic airline industry in bankruptcy and losses exceeding $30 billion in recent years, carriers certainly are not looking for another expense to take on. But they can hardly say no to the government's effort to prevent a flu outbreak.
Some industry analysts consider avian flu to be a threat to airlines equal to any conceivable terrorism episode. Airlines' costs are heavily fixed, and even in good times they operate on thin profit margins, meaning that any significant falloff in flying by the public is ruinous to the financial condition of the industry.
The airlines' trade group, the Air Transport Association, issued a statement late yesterday on the C.D.C. proposal: "There no doubt is a need to update the current regulations to ensure the absolute safety of our passengers and employees. To what extent changes need to be made to existing practices will be done cooperatively with the C.D.C. through this proposed rule making." The group declined to elaborate.
A spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines said of the association, "They speak for us." Other carriers could not be reached or would not immediately comment.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/02/hhs-ties-pandemic-mitigation-advice-severity
Filed Under: Influenza, General; Pandemic Influenza; Public Health
By: Robert Roos and Lisa Schnirring | Feb 01, 2007
Feb 1, 2007 (CIDRAP News) Federal officials today unveiled recommendations for nonpharmaceutical steps to battle pandemic influenza, tying them to a new "Pandemic Severity Index" (PSI), similar to the system for categorizing hurricanes.
Officials predicted that the early, coordinated use of "community mitigation measures" such as isolating patients, sending students home, and canceling public gatherings could make a significant difference in the course of an epidemic.
Relatively disruptive steps such as dismissing classes, changing work schedules, and canceling meetings should be reserved for moderate and severe pandemics, says the 108-page report released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
In a mild pandemic, the only community mitigation measure recommended is isolating sick people at home, along with using antiviral treatment as available.
In discussing the HHS guidance document today, Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), called the five-level PSI "an important and new concept." She said the planners designed the index to mimic hurricane classifications. With recent memories of the Category 5 Hurricane Katrina, "We have embedded in our minds different levels of severity," she said.
Severity level is initially based on case-fatality ratio (CFR), a single criterion that will likely be known even early in a pandemic when small clusters and outbreaks are occurring, the report says. Other measures, such as excess mortality, could be factored in later. Two events would prompt the CDC director to designate a pandemic category: the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring a phase 6 pandemic level and the US government declaring a stage 3, 4, or 5 alert.
The pandemic severity index levels are:
Category 1, CFR of less than 0.1%
Category 2, CFR 0.1% to 0.5%
Category 3, CFR 0.5% to 1%
Category 4, CFR 1% to 2%
Category 5, CFR 2% or higher
The PSI "has been a missing aspect to pandemic preparedness," said Dr. Marty Cetron, director of the CDC's Division of Global Migration and Quarantine.
The pandemics of 1957 and 1968 both fit into Category 2, whereas the severe pandemic of 1918-19 qualified as a Category 5, according to Cetron and Gerberding.
The new report, titled "Interim Pre-Pandemic Planning Guidance: Community Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Mitigation in the United StatesEarly, Targeted, Layered Use of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions," is the product of months of work by government agencies and many other stakeholders, officials said.
The current federal pandemic plan contains some general information on community prevention measures, but state and local public health agencies and other groups had asked for more specifics, the CDC has said.
"This was an effort that reflected a huge army of people behind it," said Cetron. "The 9 months or more we spent on it was akin to birthing a child."
In preparing the recommendations, planners looked at the history of the last three pandemics, examined mathematical models, studied seasonal flu transmission, consulted experts from many fields, and conducted citizen focus groups, Gerberding said.
"One important conclusion is the earlier you initiate an intervention, the more likely it is to make a big impact," she said.
The report describes four types of measures for battling a pandemic:
Isolation and treatment of people who have suspected or confirmed cases of pandemic influenza in their homes or in healthcare settings, depending on illness severity and medical capacity
Voluntary home quarantine of household contacts of those with suspected or confirmed pandemic influenza, along with prophylactic antiviral medication use, if available
Dismissing school classes and closing daycare centers, along with other social distancing measures for young people
Social distancing for adults through actions such as changing work schedules and environments and canceling large public gatherings
For Category 4 and 5 pandemics, the CDC recommends that all four interventions be used and that school classes be suspended for up to 12 weeks. Category 2 or 3 pandemics would warrant voluntary isolation of sick people, though other measures may be added or modified depending on the recommendations of local health authorities; for example, schools could be closed for 4 weeks instead of 12 weeks.
Regarding school closures, Cetron said one idea under discussion is that while students would be sent home, buildings could be kept open for certain pruposes, such as preparing food for delivery to children depending on the federal school lunch program.
The goals of community interventions are to slow the pandemic in order to buy time for producing an effective vaccine and to lower both the peak number of cases and total cases, the report says. Achieving those things would lighten the burden on hospitals and improve the ability to maintain society in general, Gerberding noted.
Cetron voiced hope that nondrug measures could make a real difference in a pandemic.
In looking at the results of mathematical models, he said, "There was a remarkable confluence around common themes: Earlier is better than later, and second, though a series of partially effective measures might not be effective in and of themselves, when these are layered on top of one another, they have a real additive effect." He added that the common themes emerging from different studies "are reasons for optimism."
The report says the modeling studies indicate that multiple nondrug interventions "may decrease transmission substantially and that even greater reductions may be achieved when such measures are combined with the targeted use of antiviral medications for treatment and prophylaxis."
In response to a question about the use of breathing masks, Gerberding said the CDC would be releasing some updated guidance on citizen use of masks and respirators, though she couldn't predict when. For now, she said it would make sense in a pandemic for people to use simple surgical masks to prevent their own coughing from infecting others.
Gerberding stressed that the new document is not considered final. "We fully expect that as we learn more we're going to have to update our planning tool."
Cetron acknowledged that the recommended interventions will be difficult to plan and carry out. "What we're talking about here is not going to be easy to implement. But it would be much more difficult to try to come up with a solution on the fly in the midst of a pandemic."
CDC officials also announced today the launching of public service announcements designed to educate the public about the threat of a pandemic and how to respond. But they gave no details about where or how often the advertisements will run.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/transcripts/2007/t070601.htm
TOM SKINNER, PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER, CDC: Hi. My name is Tom Skinner, and I´m a public affairs officer here at CDC, and I want to thank you today for joining us - excuse me - for this update on CDC´s investigation into people potentially exposed to a patient with XDR TB.
Joining us today is the director of the CDC, Dr. Julie Gerberding. Also with us is Dr. Marty Cetron, the director of the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, and Dr. Ken Castro, the director of the Division of Tuberculosis Elimination.
We´ll begin by having Dr. Gerberding provide a very brief opening statement, providing an update on our public health investigation, and then we´ll move to Q&A - Dr. Gerberding.
DR. JULIE GERBERDING, DIRECTOR, CDC: Thank you, everyone, for joining today. I recognize that I´m on a difficult line, and if it becomes unsuccessful, I will ask Dr. Castro and Dr. Cetron to step in for me and continue.
I´m going to provide a very brief update today on the situation involving the patient with XDR TB.
First, let me mention a couple of things about the patient. We know that the patient is receiving excellent care at the National Jewish Hospital in Denver, and while it´s certainly been a difficult time for him and his wife and his family, we are hoping, all of us at CDC, that he will have a fast and successful recovery.
We know that the early evidence at the hospital indicates that the patient still does not appear to be highly infectious, and we´re thankful for that. It - we have no indication that his infectiousness has changed at all in the last few months.
.....
https://www.c-span.org/video/?204834-1/germ-warfare-contagious-diseases
Martin "Marty" S. Cetron M.D. : Director / Centers for Disease Control and Prevention->Global Migration and Quarantine Div.
Michael Chertoff : Secretary / Department of Homeland Security
Christopher F. Chyba : Professor / Princeton University->International Affairs
Michael Greenberger : Founding Director / University of Maryland, Baltimore->Center for Health and Homeland Security
[Dr. Margaret Ann "Peggy" Hamburg (born 1955)] : [ : Senior Scientist / Nuclear Threat Initiative
Pamela S. Karlan : Professor / Stanford University->Law School
Jeffrey W. Runge M.D. : Chief Medical Officer (Former) / Department of Homeland Security
Kathleen M. Sullivan : Founding Director / Stanford University->Constitutional Law Center
Robert Weisberg : Professor / Stanford University->Law School
Ebola - Cetron and Gostin ...
https://www.c-span.org/video/?321282-1/discussion-combating-ebola-epidemic
Panelists talked about treating the Ebola epidemic in western Africa and steps to prevent future outbreaks. They discussed the magnitude of this Ebola outbreak and how it differed from previous ones. Dr. Cetron said that the virus was winning and that the resources available were not sufficient to contain it. Topics included current vaccines, what the role of the U.S. should be, and the possibility of military involvement.
William "Bill" M. Treanor : Dean / Georgetown University Law Center
Martin "Marty" S. Cetron M.D. : Director / Centers for Disease Control and Prevention->Global Migration and Quarantine Div.
G. "Kevin" Kevin Donovan M.D. : Director / Georgetown University Medical Center->Center for Clinical Bioethics
[Lawrence Oglethorpe Gostin (born 1949)] : Director / O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University
[Dr. Daniel Richard Lucey (born 1955)] : Adjunct Professor / Georgetown University Medical Center->Microbiology and Immunology
John Monahan : Global Heath Adviser / Georgetown University->Office of the President
J. "Steve" Stephen Morrison : Senior Vice President and Director / Center for Strategic and International Studies->Global Health Policy Center
The O’Neill Institute Colloquium “The West African Ebola Epidemic: How Can It be Contained and How Can We Prevent the Next One?” was held at Georgetown University Law Center.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Xuch-F5j8
415 viewsDec 4, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5Siq6Vb7i4
Science On Screen
Science On Screen® brings you to the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, MI for a screening of Contagion.
About the Speaker
Howard Markel, MD, PhD, is a physician, author, editor, professor, and medical historian. Dr. Markel is the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and director of the University of Michigan's Center for the History of Medicine. He is also professor of psychiatry, health management and policy, history, and pediatrics and communicable diseases. Dr. Markel writes extensively on major topics and figures in the history of medicine and public health, is a best-selling author, and is editor-in-chief of the health care policy journal The Milbank Quarterly.
Captain Martin Cetron, MD, is director of the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine (DGMQ) at the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID). He previously served as director of DGMQ when it was within the National Center for Preparedness, Detection, and Control of Infectious Diseases. DGMQ's mission is to prevent the introduction and spread of infectious diseases into the United States and to prevent morbidity and mortality among immigrants, refugees, migrant workers, and international travelers. Dr. Cetron's primary research interest is international health and global migration, with a focus on emerging infections, tropical diseases, and vaccine-preventable diseases in mobile populations.
By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN Senior Medical Correspondent
Link - PDF at [HM001R][GDrive] / Video on page, recording - [HM001S][GDrive]
Mentioned : Dr. Martin Stuart Cetron (born 1959) / COVID-19 Pandemic (USA's "Snohomish County Man" patient zero narrative) /
The United States has its first confirmed case of a new virus that appeared in Wuhan, China, last month, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday. The coronavirus has already sickened hundreds and killed six people in Asia.
CDC officials said the United States will be more strict about health screenings of airplane passengers arriving from Wuhan.
The patient, who is not being named, is in isolation at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington. He is in his 30s and lives in Snohomish County, Washington, just north of Seattle. He had recently returned from Wuhan.
He arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on January 15, before any health screenings for the Wuhan coronavirus began at US airports. He sought medical care on January 19. The CDC and Washington state are now tracing the people he was in contact with to see if he might have spread the disease to someone else.
"We believe the risk to the public is low," said John Wiesman, secretary of health for the state of Washington.
The patient became ill four days after arriving in the United States and sought care. Based on the patient's symptoms and travel history, doctors suspected the novel Wuhan coronavirus and sent specimens to the CDC in Atlanta, where tests Monday confirmed the virus.
The patient is faring well but is still being kept in isolation out of an abundance of caution, health officials said.
Soon, passengers from Wuhan to the United States, whether on direct or indirect flights, will only be allowed to land at one of the five US airports doing health screenings. Screenings include a temperature check and observation for symptoms such as a cough and trouble breathing.
Last weekend, the CDC started health screenings for Wuhan passengers arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International Airport.
Starting this week, Wuhan passengers will also be screened at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Chicago O'Hare International Airport.
The CDC raised its travel notice for Wuhan, China, from level 1 to level 2 of three possible levels, according to its website. As of Tuesday afternoon, the agency advised travelers to "practice enhanced precautions." The highest level, "Warning - Level 3," advises travelers to "avoid nonessential travel."
The Wuhan coronavirus is in the same family as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which killed more than 700 people in 2002 and 2003, and Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS.
To date, the Wuhan coronavirus has infected more than 300 people and killed six in an outbreak that has struck China, Thailand, South Korea, Japan and now the US.
It's not known how many of the cases became infected from animals and how many from another person.
On Tuesday, the CDC activated its emergency response system in response to the Wuhan coronavirus. The CDC activates this system on a temporary basis to centralize how the agency monitors, prepares for and responds to public health threats.
The outbreak started in late December at an animal market in Wuhan, about 700 miles south of Beijing. The virus can jump from animals to people.
While there's much to learn about how easily the virus can be transmitted human-to-human, health officials said it appears that it's not spread as easily as some other viruses.
"This isn't anywhere near in the same category as measles or the flu," [Dr. Martin Stuart Cetron (born 1959)], director of CDC's division of global migration and quarantine, told CNN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikf50jPC-kQ
The World Health Organization's emergency committee will recommend whether or not the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern – a PHEIC.
The WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has the final say on declaring a PHEIC. If he does, he would then issue recommendations to countries to combat the new virus, although WHO has no enforcement power.
The U.S. representative at the meeting is Martin Cetron, who heads the division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first U.S. case, reported Tuesday, involves a Washington state resident in his 30s who first displayed symptoms Sunday. He was listed in good condition at Providence Regional Medical Center in Snohomish County north of Seattle.
The WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has the final say on declaring a PHEIC. If he does, he would then issue recommendations to countries to combat the new virus, although WHO has no enforcement power.
The U.S. representative at the meeting is Martin Cetron, who heads the division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first U.S. case, reported Tuesday, involves a Washington state resident in his 30s who first displayed symptoms Sunday. He was listed in good condition at Providence Regional Medical Center in Snohomish County north of Seattle.
BY EMILY BAUMGAERTNER / JAN. 21, 2020 8:10 PM PT / PDF of source : HN027C][GDrive]
Mentioned : Dr. Rebecca Lynn Katz (born 1973) / Dr. Martin Stuart Cetron (born 1959) / Dr. Nancy Messonnier (born 1965) / COVID-19 Pandemic (USA's "Snohomish County Man" patient zero narrative) /
A man in Washington state has been sickened by the new coronavirus spreading through Asia, marking the first confirmed case in the United States, experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday.
The patient, a resident of Snohomish County, Wash., recently returned to the United States after visiting the region around Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak. Once inside the U.S., he began to experience pneumonia-like symptoms and notified his doctor about his travel history. Test results for the virus returned positive over the weekend.
The man, who is in his 30s, was transported to Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, where he is being monitored and is good condition, officials said.
Chinese officials said that at least 440 cases had been reported as of early Wednesday, most of them in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province, where nine have died. Officials have also identified 21 cases in Beijing, Shanghai and southern Guangdong province.
Additional cases of infected patients have been confirmed in South Korea, Japan and Thailand, according to the Chinese government. And Taiwan’s disease surveillance officials said Tuesday that one traveler to Wuhan has returned sickened with the virus.
The patient in Everett is the only known case outside of Asia, and he represents the farthest spread of the novel coronavirus.
“We do expect additional cases in the U.S. and globally,” said [Dr. Nancy Messonnier (born 1965)], director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
At the same time, public heath officials emphasized that the virus poses a low risk to the American public, and that it’s unlikely to spread widely here.
Chinese health officials initially said that most patients infected with the virus in Wuhan were exposed to live animals in a large seafood market, suggesting that the virus jumped from another species into humans and may not spread directly from person to person. But the Washington state patient, along with several others, said he had not visited the market.
On Monday, Zhong Nanshan, a Chinese government scientist, announced on Chinese state television that the virus can be transmitted between humans.
Even before that development, public health officials were concerned that the virus would spread more widely as travel picks up for the Lunar New Year.
Airline passengers arriving from the outbreak region are already being screened for the virus’ pneumonia-like symptoms at Los Angeles International Airport, San Francisco International Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. The CDC said it would begin monitoring travelers at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport this week.
The Washington state patient entered the country before any of those screenings were implemented. But even if they had been in place, he would not have been detected because he was asymptomatic at the time, experts said.
“Leave no doubt: Entry screening is just one part of a multilayered system,” said [Dr. Martin Stuart Cetron (born 1959)], the head of the CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine. “Individuals are empowered to make good decisions if they’re informed.”
Outside experts cautioned that the increased airport screenings will be expensive, and that it will take some time to get answers to basic questions like what animal was the source of this virus and what makes some people more susceptible to infection than others.
“Basic epidemiology questions remain unanswered,” said [Dr. Rebecca Lynn Katz (born 1973)], the director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University. “The CDC is the best of the best, and we should have faith in their leadership.”
Officials have begun to trace the Washington man’s contacts from China to his home in the United States in order to identify other people who may be infected, said Dr. Scott Lindquist, a communicable disease epidemiologist at the Washington State Department of Health.
Brett Murphy, Letitia Stein : USA TODAY / updated jan 26 2021
2020-05-09-usatoday-com-white-house-push-airport-fever-screenings-overrules-cdc-scientists.pdf
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The White House is pushing a return to a failed strategy of relying on temperature screening of air travelers to detect coronavirus despite vehement objections from the nation's top public health agency, internal documents obtained by USA TODAY show.
The discord underscores the diminished standing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as local governments, businesses and community leaders seek direction on how to reopen safely.
Emails show CDC scientists, who have begun to own up to initial missteps in the federal response, trying to persuade the administration to reconsider.
The White House directive to check travelers in 20 U.S. airports for fever comes after earlier efforts by the CDC to screen travelers returning from China failed to stop the global pandemic from reaching the USA.
“Thermal scanning as proposed is a poorly designed control and detection strategy as we have learned very clearly,” Dr. Martin Cetron, the CDC’s director of global mitigation and quarantine, wrote in an email to Department of Homeland Security officials Thursday. “We should be concentrating our CDC resources where there is impact and a probability of mission success.”
Cetron questioned his agency’s legal authority to execute the airport plan, ending the email: “Please kindly strike out CDC from this role.”
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White House chief of staff Mark Meadows pressed ahead anyway, directing the DHS to announce the airport screenings, which would be visible and aimed at instilling confidence in travelers, according to meeting notes.
Passengers with fever, Meadows said, would be referred to the CDC for clearance. The full plan has not been finalized.
The exchange follows two weeks of internal skirmishes between the CDC and the Office of Management and Budget over how to safely reopen the nation’s schools, restaurants and churches.
Separate emails show the public health agency’s recommendations that bars install sneeze shields and teachers space student desks 6 feet apart were dismissed as overly prescriptive.
As a result, detailed plans – which CDC Director Robert Redfield personally approved – have idled in administration officials’ email inboxes since late April. The Associated Press has reported on the draft guidelines since last Tuesday, but an official plan has not been released.
At the height of restrictions in late March and early April, more than 310 million Americans were under directives ranging from “shelter in place” to “stay at home.” Governors across the USA are rolling out a patchwork of plans to relax social distancing restrictions.
“The number one public health agency is completely ineffective in the most important of moments,” said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “It’s so absurd.”
CDC spokesman Benjamin Haynes said in a statement that Redfield has had a seat at the table throughout the crisis.
The agency’s public health expertise is “helping shape our nation’s response, as well as the response by our state and local health department partners who continue to be on the front line fighting this war,” Haynes said.
He said the CDC is revising its reopening guidance, based on White House feedback, but did not address the records that show the agency sparring with administration officials over the airport screenings, referring questions to the White House.
White House spokesman Judd Deere downplayed any discord, noting the administration has been “encouraging all Americans to follow the CDC guidelines from the very beginning of this pandemic.”
He said the that the CDC never cleared the reopening instructions it wanted to issue and that standardized guidance would be inappropriate across all states. Deere did not answer questions about the airport screening proposal.
In an Oval Office meeting last week, President Donald Trump signaled support for some form of increased health screenings, which airlines hope will convince travelers it's safe to fly again.
This week, the chief executive officer of Southwest Airlines said the Transportation Security Administration should add temperature scans to airport security checkpoints, and discount carrier Frontier announced plans to screen passengers before they board with touchless thermometers, beginning June 1.
The White House Coronavirus Task Force requested evidence of results from the screenings after the president restricted travel from China early in the U.S. outbreak in late January, emails show.
Scientists, including those at the CDC, have repeatedly insisted that those measures miss the large percentage of people infected with COVID-19 who display no symptoms or can infect others before or without spiking a fever. And fever can be a sign of a wide range of illnesses.
In Nevada, public health officials struggled to get basic details from the CDC about contact information for the early travelers it was supposed to track, according to records obtained by USA TODAY under a public records request.
The head of the state’s Department of Health and Human Services sent an alarmed letter to Redfield on Feb. 11.
“I am concerned about the breakdown between the communication the states have received from the CDC,” Nevada public health director Richard Whitley wrote. “The lack of communication in this circumstance created frustration and confusion for all those involved."
CDC spokesman Haynes said issues were addressed "as quickly and efficiently as possible," calling the airport screenings in January unprecedented.
The CDC has begun a public and private reckoning of its early mistakes, putting it at odds with a White House that has steadfastly defended the federal response.
An internal CDC memo, commissioned at the request of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and obtained by USA TODAY, reviews how the federal government missed early warning signs as the virus spread undetected around Washington state and California as early as late January.
The agency published a report last week highlighting the role of travel and large gatherings such as Mardi Gras, a professional conference in Boston and a small-town funeral in contributing to the early spread. The analysis was intended to help public health officials better prepare for another outbreak and not repeat mistakes.
The federal government’s coronavirus failures may have started with the first case documented in the USA, the CDC acknowledged in the internal memo documenting the disease’s spread.
Viral genetic sequencing suggests a link from the first case detected in late January in Washington state, involving a man who had traveled to China, to a chain of about 300 infections, although numbers vary widely.
The same viral line circulated on a Grand Princess cruise ship that departed several weeks later out of California, the first in a set of voyages that ended with the evacuation and quarantine of passengers.
That explosion of infections occurred despite the CDC’s leadership of a vigorous public health response. The Washington state resident’s close contacts were carefully tracked and monitored.
In the internal memo, the agency speculated that its efforts could have missed people who were infectious but only later, or never, showed symptoms. Large numbers of those infected with the virus are known to be asymptomatic, although at the time that had not been fully recognized.
“The virus could have spread from this case, despite the thorough investigation and response,” the CDC memo says, adding a concerning conclusion for a country facing a likely second wave of the virus: The origin of the Washington cluster “will probably always be unknown.”
The agency’s internal accounting of how the virus spread recognizes another shortcoming in the testing in the early stages of the outbreak. Critical weeks elapsed in February when there was minimal testing capacity after the CDC botched the development of what was then the nation’s only coronavirus test.
In the memo, the CDC says early transmission occurred during a period of “limited availability of testing.” Instead of highlighting its own delays in developing a reliable test, the agency described a Food and Drug Administration policy that blocked the scaling up of testing through commercial laboratories until late February.
Public health officials in Santa Clara County, California, learned from autopsies that two people who died in their homes in early and mid-February were infected with the new coronavirus – suggesting the virus was spreading locally much earlier than recognized.
These deaths occurred “when very limited testing was available only through the CDC,” the California health officials said in a news release, noting that the agency’s guidance on testing then excluded people without a travel history or specific symptoms.
The CDC’s internal memo minimizes the agency’s authority in those situations.
“CDC guidelines emphasized that they were just that – ‘guidelines’ – and that decisions about testing needed to be made on a case-by-case basis,” the document says, adding that the discoveries in Santa Clara County, which the agency confirmed in late April, were still “preliminary and could easily change.”
Haynes, the CDC spokesman, confirmed the government made decisions in January and February based on available data of likely exposures by those who had traveled to Wuhan, China. He said, "CDC guidance has always allowed for clinical discretion on who should be tested.”
Dr. Alison Roxby, a University of Washington epidemiologist who has been testing nursing home patients in the Seattle area, said she has been consistently let down by the federal response. She compared her experiences – vying for testing supplies daily with little clear direction from the federal government – to her time working in developing African countries.
“The leadership vacuum is tremendous,” Roxby said, noting that inconsistent public health messages have contributed to people mistakenly believing the crisis has passed.
“It’s not over,” Roxby said. “It’s the eye of the hurricane.”
2022-05-02-usa-gov-congress-house-of-rep-interview-martin-c-cetron-redacted.pdf
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U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WASHINGTON, D.C. INTERVIEW OF: MARTIN CETRON, M.D. MONDAY, MAY 2, 2022 The Interview Commenced at 9:10 a.m.
David J. Sencer CDC Museum, Global Health Chronicles
Samuel Robson, Interviewer | 2016.600.152.1
CDC Ebola Response Oral History Project
https://globalhealthchronicles.org/ohms-viewer/viewer.php?cachefile=MartyCetronXML.xml
Dr. Martin S. Cetron
CETRON: There were a number of emotionally laden memories about the response. It was a long response, one of the longest. I've been doing these responses with CDC [United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] for twenty-six years and this one was the toughest in a lot of ways. There were some really hard ones, SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome], [influenza] pandemic,monkeypox, and MERS [Middle East respiratory syndrome]. There's a lot of them that were [challenging], but this was uniquely different and difficult and it was a big chunk of your life. It wasn't a three-month SARS thing where you get in, you sprint, and get out. You go through a whole series of [emotions]--it's a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. There are various points along that way where things stand out.
One of them which was a consolidating, almost a processing cathartic experience. In September of '15, I think that's probably right, I was asked to give an
hour-long--I'm Jewish, and that time of year is our New Year's celebration and Yom Kippur, kind of a holy day of the year. I was asked to try to explain and tell the Ebola story to a congregation, to a group of about one thousand non-technical people, as interpreted through certain kinds of teachings and Jewish text and make a linkage between the time of year. They call it a d'var. I had prepared for it for months and then given it in late September, early October of 2015. That was a pretty emotionally laden time.
There were many others. The various times of pleading with the WHO [World Health Organization] much earlier. I sit on the emergency committees of many big responses for WHO, and trying to argue the need for action sooner [in this outbreak] than they were ready and willing to act. Transporting the first people back here to Emory [University Hospital], to others, hearing about exposures of colleagues and safe extraction. I run a large program and have a set of responsibilities that is both international and domestic, and at the time duringEbola, our team size was four hundred-plus. We had one hundred people probably cumulatively working in the field. The October surprise and the October events
happened, and the '14 pre-election, and Thomas Duncan and all of those things. I was called back to set up the domestic program at our airports and spent the next several weeks living in five quarantine stations trying to stand up a program that we had been designing for pandemics of influenza and had never really implemented, but had created a lot of exercises and plans and strategies around. We said once the decision was made to operate an entry evaluation program, we would need three weeks to stand up and get functional, and the White House said you've got six days. [laughter] You've got six days to create a USG [United States government]-wide, second-layer safety net, because most of our [border effort] was concentrated on containment at the source. Coming back to
build a domestic firewall and trying to live in the old quarantine station at JFK [John F. Kennedy International Airport], sleeping in the exam [examination] rooms, finding all the old history. Some of those memories sunk in. Mostly the fear and stigma and the emotional heartache of wrenching with the situation where your instincts for self-protection are exactly the wrong thing. The violation that occurs between--the instincts you would normally use to cope to survive are the things that you have to completely let go of. To me, the biggestthing which I wrote this d'var about was that this epidemic showed what happens
when there's a "bankruptcy of trust." Trust everywhere: personal, familial, institutional, governmental, societal, international relations. It just was a fundamental bankruptcy of trust and it didn't matter how technically good our agencies or our collective skillsets were. In the absence, in the bankruptcy of trust, which is very hard to reestablish in the middle of a crisis, that was the single most significant driving factor that was extending the epidemic. That and a certain lack of humility which is reflected by a favorite quote of mine from Stephen Hawking which is, "The enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it's the illusion of knowledge." There were a lot of illusory beliefs that got in the way
of the kind of open mindedness that's needed when you're facing a new emerging threat. You may think you're familiar with the pathogen, but it's not just about the pathogen, it's the pathogen, the person and the milieu as an intersection, and sometimes what you think you know just gets in the way of what you need to be open to, to find a better way out. If you had to boil down what I'll tell you in the next hour, it's bankruptcy of trust, humility, logistics.
I guess the other really key theme for me was the world was looking for control and the suffering victims of Ebola were looking for compassion. Control without compassion or care, however you want to look at that. It's not like people
didn't care. But if the priority was protecting everybody else to control the epidemic from spreading, which was critically important--doing that in which you didn't establish a right to care, my job as the director of the quarantine program is to constantly balance the line between protecting the public's good and interest while respecting and understanding the needs of the individuals who were victims of disease. That's what I've been doing for twenty years, trying to walk the tightrope. I think there's a lot of false dichotomies out there about those being "either/or." In the easiest sense, you can say either we protect the public or we engage and provide care to the victim, but you can't do both. Well, I fundamentally disagree with that. I think these are false dichotomies. There are ways to do public protection and compassionate care [while protecting]
individual rights. Treating people like victims and not vectors. But that's the tension: is it a victim or is it a vector, do we extend compassion or do we restrict and contain? And you can do both. It's an intensive process, and it may be in the front end more resource-intensive to find the least restrictive means and to thread that needle, but in the end the absence of doing that process creates an untenable seesaw between epidemic control and care, buy-in, and trust. You're building trust when you create the balance in that tension. I think those were the themes for me over two years. They were vividly illustrated, it was intense. I have never seen so many people committing so much of their time, energy and emotional blood, sweat, and tears to work on an
epidemic and yet feeling so helpless about that ability to control things.
Q: If it's okay, maybe during this interview we can talk about some of those experiences that you drew from to think of those themes, all of those little incidents that illustrated that.
CETRON: Some of those are in this little reflection. That opportunity to speak to a thousand strangers--not strangers, community non-public-health people--with a perspective about that, really provided--not only preparing it forced me to think through the themes, but also there was a certain amount of catharsis in
letting go of the trauma of the experience. Those were some of the bigger issues for me. On the other hand, it's quite a privilege to be in that space, as you see. I mean your job, you bear witness to story, and to bear witness to a storythat intense and emotional and raw, that's a pretty powerful thing.
Q: It's been a privilege in itself. Some people went through the most intense experiences that I can imagine here at CDC, and they just continue to work here at Roybal [Campus], or--
CETRON: No matter where you were, it was hard to be untouched by the power of it because it was an onslaught in the media, the images are compelling, everyone
could see themselves in the victims. And the inequities; the fact that the mortality rate is eighty percent if you're left there and twenty percent if you're here. There's so much you have to grapple with in that setting.
Q: No doubt.
[break]
Q: This is Sam Robson here with Dr. Marty Cetron. Today's date is January 10th, 2018, and we're in the audio recording studio at CDC's Roybal Campus in Atlanta, Georgia. I am interviewing Dr. Cetron today as part of our CDC Ebola Response Oral History project for the David J. Sencer CDC Museum. Dr. Cetron, thank you very much for being here.
CETRON: My pleasure.
Q: Could you please state, if you could, your full name and your current position with CDC?
CETRON: My name is Martin Stuart Cetron and I'm the director of [the Division of] Global Migration and Quarantine, and that's in the National Center for
Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease. I've been in this job for more than twenty years.
Q: If you were to give someone an elevator speech, just a few-sentence description of what your role was in the Ebola epidemic, what would you say?
CETRON: As the director of the Global Migration and Quarantine program, our mission is to prevent international spread of infectious disease threats, protecting in particular the American public and American interests abroad, while also recognizing and dealing with the epidemic at its source in the context of the individual victims who are suffering from this. There's this duel responsibility of preventing importation and spread, containing things at the source, and being sure that the epidemic can be brought under control as quickly
as possible to minimize suffering and death.
Q: Could you tell me when and where you were born?
CETRON: I was born in Philadelphia, February 23rd, 1959.
Q: Did you grow up in Philadelphia?
CETRON: I grew up in Philadelphia for the early years, and then my family moved across the river to southern New Jersey for high school years.
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about those early years? What was your family like? Who made up your family?
CETRON: I'm from a small family of four. I was the oldest. I had a younger sister, two years younger. My dad and mom were both rural Pennsylvania born and raised, first ones of their families to go to college. My dad was from Lancaster, Pennsylvania; my mom from Scranton. My dad was a dentist and an endodontist after that, and he has his office in the basement of our house. We
grew up in an urban environment in a very, very supportive family.
Q: What precipitated the move to New Jersey?
CETRON: I think my dad was moving from a general practice dentistry to a specialty in essentially, what is the infectious disease equivalent of dentistry, which is endodontics or root canals, dealing with infected teeth that needed to be managed in more complicated settings. There was a practice he was going to join across the river.
Q: What kind of stuff did you find cool or interesting when you were a kid?
CETRON: Gosh, a lot of stuff. I always liked international opportunities, travel and exposure. I was sort of a geek for science and math, and the STEM [science technology, engineering, and mathematics] fields in general. I spent a lot of
time outdoors in the environment, and to the extent that was possible, I was always trying to get away and explore some other place, some other culture, some other group. Tremendous curiosity about humanity.
Q: Was there an early experience where you were exploring a group of people who were different from you that really stands out?
CETRON: There's a number of experiences. I was very fortunate to have these. As a young kid, I spent the summers working on a kibbutz in Israel doing agricultural work and living in a sort of communal setting with other, non-US kids, Israeli kids my age. We had a lot of raw hand, farm labor type experiences, but it was real interesting to see that society and culture where people of a similar age cohort live together, separated from their parents
except for weekends. But also the cross-cultural activities, the exposure. It was an interesting time. I think it was the late sixties, maybe early seventies. It was a time of a lot of tension. There was war in the Middle East very close to the place where I was working. My sensibilities about international engagement, international politics, how to reconcile arguments and disputes between people on big issues, land and background, peace, religion, all these kinds of things, were really prominent. I was quite fascinated by that sort of whole setting, the milieu of living and working in that environment. And it was a place where you have to confront some pretty stark differences between people who have lots of means and people who are living and struggling more in terms of
their socioeconomic status. A lot of the world's problems came closely into view for me and to my eyes, both from a religious perspective, a cultural perspective, a socioeconomic perspective. What was most apparent in all of that was that despite all these differences and contrasts which could be emotionally wrenching, it was easy to see a thread of common humanity in different spaces. By far, there were many more things that people shared in common than the differences that defined them.
Q: Given these formative experiences of witnessing disparities and conflict, did that influence what you wanted to do with your life? What were you thinking at that point in time?
CETRON: Oh, yeah. It was the combination of those experiences, my complete
intellectual fascination with the sciences and medicine and the way the human body worked. I had a pretty early, strong driver to go into medicine. I wanted to be a doctor from as early as I can remember, and that was crystalized further by an experience I had with my dad who became critically ill when I was quite young, I think in high school, after returning from a trip to Mexico. He got very sick and developed liver failure and was in the hospital for months at a time. We were told he was on death's door, and none of the really talented, bright, Western doctors from the University of Pennsylvania and all these high-powered academic institutions had any idea what was making him so sick,
what infection he got that made him so sick after simply taking a trip to our neighboring country. It was a complete medical mystery, but a very personal one. Unlike the medical mystery stories that I enjoyed reading, Berton Roueche solving all those kinds of things, this one really hit home. I think the combination of experiences I had leading up to that, and then that pretty powerful experience with my dad's illness, which gratefully he recovered from,and later was able to be diagnosed in retrospect, was probably the driver. Not only did I know I wanted to go into medicine, but I wanted to be an infectious disease specialist and I wanted to specialize in tropical medicine and understand the global picture and maybe have a better understanding and ability to intervene and control the global disease threats that had affected me so personally.
Q: It's a pretty mature career aspiration for a young kid. [laughs]
CETRON: Yeah, it was probably more rooted in fantasy than reality, but through the next thirty years I'm sort of probing for both affirming and disaffirming experiences around that. I think I was able to navigate a very circuitous and iterative path to test different aspects of that along the way.
Q: What did you do after high school?
CETRON: After high school, one of the things as I eluded to, I had this strong sense of adventure and a passion for the outdoors. I sort of drew a circle with a certain minimum distance that I needed to be from home to have a different experience and looked at schools that would be both intellectually challenging in that regard but also giving me a lot of opportunities to explore people that
were different from me and the wilderness. I was fortunate to be admitted to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the sort of rural parts of NewHampshire. It offered that environment, which I found probably transformative in terms of my ability to create more independent thoughts, to find and build community in a small environment, to enjoy the White and Green Mountains of New England on a regular basis, to participate in Outward Bound programs in the winters in college, but also the quarter system at that school offered me a chance to spend a lot of time off campus traveling internationally. Finally, the small size and the very close relationship between the faculty and the studentsenabled me to get involved with a mentor my freshman year. It was Bob [Robert H.] Gross' first year as a biology professor on campus and we struck up a
relationship in an early class I had, which continued for thirty-five years until his death. But he became an individual mentor for me and taught me molecular biology and science and genetics, and it was a really precious relationship that extended beyond Bob but to include his family as well.
Q: What happens after high school? What do you do then?
CETRON: After high school or after college?
Q: I'm sorry, after college at Dartmouth.
CETRON: After college, I'd had a number of international opportunities to study language abroad and do other kinds of things and travel extensively. The debate was Bob had always tried to convince me that really, physicians couldn't be scientists, and that I should pursue a science degree and get a PhD [doctorate of philosophy] instead of an MD [doctorate of medicine]. I think he thought if
you really want to do science, you should get a PhD. This was a time in the seventies, so my college years were the [late] seventies, like '77 to '81, wheremolecular biology was becoming the science, not the tool, of genetic study. He had encouraged me to look at job opportunities with Genentech and Biogen, two big startup genetic molecular biology tech [technology] engineering companies on both coasts, one in Cambridge, one in San Francisco. I went out and had job interviews, and I was weighing--the debate between, did I want to go intomedicine or science? Then I took a hard look at both my interests and my skillsets and I realized that I learned a lot in the lab [laboratory] with him over four years, but I wasn't particularly good at it. [laughter] I wanted to be
good at it. I worked hard but I kind of sucked. I had a number of experiences that he, in his patience, he put up with me in that regard. But as I thought back, they were telling signs that I was probably better in medicine than at the bench doing basic research, and in particular that the places that I wanted to interact were at the macro level and not the micro level. Part of what was challenging for me in the research lab was working with things I couldn't see,microliter quantities of materials and molecular interactions. I really appreciated them, I believed wholeheartedly they were there, but I couldn't interact with them with that degree of precision to be good at replicating my work and my experiments. On the other hand, big picture challenges, system challenges, interactions between people and populations, culture and society, all of those types of interactions were always much more appealing and
fascinating to me in that regard.
So I went to medical school. I went to Boston to medical school. I looked at programs that had strong infectious disease training opportunities and international training opportunities. While I was in medical school at Boston at Tufts [University], I spent a good part of my fourth year, the latter part of my fourth year studying in India, particularly in the south. These were through contacts of my mentors and teachers at Tufts who were tremendously influential people, infectious disease giants in their own right, but also had a significant amount of engagement in tropical medicine and "geographic medicine" as it was known at the time. The chance to go over and live and work and study medicine in a tropical environment like South India over several months was one of those
really affirming as opposed to the disaffirming experiences in the lab. The really affirming experience of living, working overseas in a population-based setting, looking at problems like leprosy and other tropical infectious disease issues, was tremendously influential and in some ways transformative.
Not only did I fall in love with tropical infectious disease and had a whole world of experiences to draw upon, I fell in love with Indian culture and tradition and rituals and practices and understandings. I left at the end of fourth year, graduated from Boston, and went to the University of Virginia to do internal medicine for three years of training. I think in my first rotation on
the wards, I met and fell in love with an Indian woman who I later married after a number of years, and we have sort of blended our cross-cultural backgrounds between her Indian story and my sort of Eastern European Jewish narrative into this Hind-Jew, we call it, [laughter] exposure. Maya, who's been significantlythe most important person in my life over the last close to thirty-five, forty years, has not only shared some of those interests and passions that I have, she was a nurse on the wards. I was on my first rotation, which was oncology. I had a really sick cancer patient. She was a specialist in nursing cancer patients, and I was a very green intern. I had just had all these months of experience processing my time in India, so not only did I fall in love with her beauty and
mystique, but she was an intellectual powerhouse and knew a lot more about whatshe was doing than I did at what I was doing. We combined to be a team, and she really taught me how to care for cancer patients beyond just the science of that. How to draw up and deliver chemotherapy, how to listen at the bedside, and a lot of her intuition, a lot of her skills, a lot of her cultural background that led her to be such a fantastic nurse were really formative.
At University of Virginia, I ended up staying in Charlottesville with her and in the program for three years of internal medicine, then a year of emergency medicine on the faculty, but continued to pursue my--and the University of
Virginia had a really, really strong tropical infectious disease program and wonderful mentors for me to draw on there. I had a chance to work and study and live abroad in Brazil for a number of years through the UVA [University of Virginia] program and began to meet other people with similar interests who had made careers that were about ten years senior to me. Really influential people: Dick [Richard L.] Guerrant, Dick [Richard D.] Pearson, many others on the geographic medicine department at UVA, had active work going on in leishmaniasis and diarrheal disease and all sorts of tropical infectious diseases. Again, another really strongly affirming experiencing, Brazil being very different from India in some respects, but understanding culture, community, population, engagement, circumstances, and falling in love with parasitic infectious
diseases. I spent a lot of time working with Leishmania and Chagas disease, two parasites that were spread through a variety of vectors. I became totally fascinated and enamored with that part of the science of medicine and the pathology and the interaction between pathogen and host and the environment, and that all three of those things, that sort of holy trinity of infectious disease, that really took a strong grip for me.
From there, I was looking to have deeper professional and specialty understanding of infectious disease, and I went to the University of Washington to do a fellowship in infectious disease and took my experience and contact and exposure in Brazil back into the lab again to do some basic immunology research
on Chagas disease, looking at the host immune response to this parasitic infection, to Trypanosoma cruzi, which once people were bitten by the reduviid bug and the parasite was injected into the body, it persisted there for life through some very clever interactions with the host's immune system, often in low level. But then it created an immune response in the host that was an autoimmune response that was destructive against host tissue, and our research project was to understand this concept of autoimmunity with regard to this parasitic infection. It turned out that we discovered an antigen on the flagellum of this parasite which mimics nervous tissue in humans. When the body developed an immune response to try to get rid of the parasite, it was also developing an immune response that attacked the nervous tissue in the heart, which makes the conduction system work, and the nervous system in the gut, which
makes the GI [gastrointestinal] tract work. As a consequence, patients with chronic Chagas disease go on to get cardiomyopathy, a heart problem, and their heart dilates and it doesn't pace properly, and they get megacolon or mega GI tract, and their intestine doesn't move and peristalsis doesn't work properly.
My role in all of this, the lab I was working in with Wes [Wesley C.] Van Voorhis at the University of Washington, was looking at the molecular interactions. As probably has become obvious by now, I was much more interested in the population-level interactions. I was working to set up a field program to find chronically infected Chagas patients, those that had heart disease, those that had GI disease, and those that had no apparent disease, and try to contrast what was different about them and their bodies and their bodies' response to the
parasite and see if we could sort out what drove some people to get heart problems and some to get GI problems and some to just keep everything in check with no apparent problems. We set up a research lab in northeastern Brazil, in Fortaleza, with the University of Fortaleza and some partners there, and enrolled people from all over the northeast that had chronic Chagas disease. We drew their blood, we separated their blood cells out to find their immune response, their immune cells, their lymphocytes and peripheral blood mononuclearcells, and we exposed them to different stimuli with some of the antigens that we were discovering in the laboratory at University of Washington and tried to assess in a Petri dish their immune cells' different responses to these antigens that we thought were triggering. That was sort of a four-year project between doing clinical medicine in Seattle. I would also do clinical ID [infectious
disease] ward rounds at the university hospital in Ceara. Sao Jose Hospital was the infectious disease hospital in Ceara, and several really influential clinical mentors taught me a lot about tropical infectious disease. Anastacio [de Quieroz Sousa], who I recall very fondly, ran the hospital of Sao Jose, and I would do ward rounds for him when we weren't doing the research work. I fell under a mentor from the University of Virginia who was a brilliant pediatrician that was working in diarrheal disease named Jay McAuliffe. He was the director of Project Hope. Later on when Jay's Project Hope tenure was over, I recruited Jay to CDC, to come here, and I lived with Jay and his wife, Bell, in their
house through the birth of both of their kids. I would live with those guys, see patients with Anastacio, and do research on Chagas disease. It was a pretty great life.
Q: It sounds incredible. What years were these again?
CETRON: I think '89 to '92.
Q: Okay, finishing up in 1992.
Q: That's when I had to decide, where was all this going? It was pretty clear to me that I liked clinical medicine, I enjoyed patient care, especially patient populations that were different from outside--either people who had traveled to those places and gotten sick with things that no one knew about, which harkened me all the way back to my childhood days and my father's experience, or working with the diaspora populations of immigrants and refugees who were born elsewhere and then had moved to the US to various places and needed someone who understood
the infectious disease issues in those communities. I was involved in working in, and in some cases, running the tropical infectious disease clinics at these other training places along the way. When I wasn't in Brazil doing tropical infectious disease onsite, I was doing it at the University of Washington in clinics there that dealt with travelers, immigrants, refugees, migrant workers,etcetera. Really, really rewarding. As a result of that, we often made diagnoses that were pretty rare in the US and many of which didn't have treatments that were readily approved or available in the US. They required orphan drugs, which weren't fully approved in FDA [Food and Drug Administration] because they didn't have a huge market here.
That's when I first had my interactions with CDC. I would call up the CDC Drug Service, which kept a supply for investigational use of these orphan drugs to
treat exotic infectious disease. I first met some people in the Division of Parasitic Disease through that process. Ralph Bryan was an early mentor of mine. He was a CDC medical epidemiologist who had gone through EIS [Epidemic Intelligence Service], and he was overseeing the clinical approval process for the Parasitic Disease Drug Service. I'd call up on a pretty regular basis and talk to Ralph and say, "I've got a patient with Chagas disease from here," or "I've got somebody with leishmaniasis cutaneous, mucocutaneous from Brazil," or "somebody with leish from India, and we need some consultation and support for treatment strategies." I was just blown away because I probably had naively thought that I knew something about these compared to some of my colleagues in
academia. [laughter] When you're in that setting and you've got that experience, people will turn to you as the expert on that problem. But in reality, my knowledge of this field could fit in a thimble compared to the people I was consulting with at CDC. I was pretty blown away by the depth of understanding, expertise, commitment, and the challenge and passion for what seemed to be a pretty narrow space of interest for most US physicians. But there was this whole program at CDC, the Division of Parasitic Diseases, which was filled with brilliant people of all sorts: PhDs, MDs, veterinarians, and they knew stuff about this that was just beyond the pale. It was fascinating, the depth ofunderstanding, the appreciation and commitment. As I said, I at times thought I
had a fair amount of experience, but nowhere near it. I was totally enamored with the interactions that I had here. Then one day, as my three years of fellowship training was ending, Ralph said, "What are you doing next year?" And I said, "I don't know. I'm interviewing for faculty positions, I'm interviewing for ID practice positions." But I said, "This is who I am. What I really like is population-based medicine in developing country settings, and I'm more of a big picture person than a bench scientist. I love clinical practice and patient care, but I really feel like I want to get at the root cause, the system baseroot cause of some of these issues." He said, "You belong at CDC, you belong here. You should come here. Have you heard of EIS?" I said, "No, what's that?" "Epidemic Intelligence Service." Boy, it had a great ring and appeal to it. Ralph convinced me to look into it, and the next thing I knew I was applying to
the EIS program and learning about how to be an epidemiologist. Because one of the challenges in typical medical education for me at that time was there weren't a lot of role models that I was aware of, or exposed to, that had actually studied the epidemiology of infectious disease and tropical medicine or the factors that go into driving an epidemic. There were a lot of people who did individual clinical patient care, and there were a lot of people who did bug-specific research at the bench in infectious disease. But there weren't nearly as many--and admittedly, this was thirty years ago or so--that really understood the epidemiology of infectious disease, that appreciated that interaction between pathogen, host, and environment, and could define it,
describe it, characterize it, and once having that appreciation, get involved in influencing the trajectory of epidemics or understanding the cause of epidemics. He convinced me pretty easily that EIS was the right next step, and I came to CDC in June of '92, and I've been here ever since.
Q: Did you place immediately in [the Division of] Migration and Quarantine, or what happened?
CETRON: There was no Migration and Quarantine then. It was a very interesting thing. I came actually thinking, somewhat naively, that I was just coming--if I could get into the program, I was just coming to work with Ralph. Then I realized as I learned more that EIS was a broad program. You interviewed and you went to a match and then you got to a program. Fortunately, in the end, I did end up with the Division of Parasitic Disease, and Ralph was my supervisor for those two years. But it was just the beginning of understanding things.
I did EIS '92 to '94. After that it was pretty clear that I wanted to stay. My wife was actually going to stay in Seattle at the time, she had a great job. She had switched over from critical care and hematology-oncology nursing and bone marrow transplants at the university to doing public health work at Seattle, King County. We had bought our first house, she was very settled, and she said, "You're going to go to do EIS for two years, you're going to be traveling all over the world, and there's not much for me, so I'm going to stay here." And I said, "Nah, we should try something together." We talked it through. She applied to Emory [University] to the MPH [master of public health] program, and she spent the two years getting a master's degree and I spent the two years in EIS. We kept our house in Seattle with the full intent of going back, but we both really fell in love with what CDC had to offer. I did parasitic disease for a
couple of years. At the end of that, my first child was born, and it was clear that we were going to stay. I was offered a job to deal with a new, emerging problem in antimicrobial resistance, and so I joined Rob [Robert F.] Breiman's group in Bacterial Respiratory Diseases. I worked on setting up the surveillance systems for drug resistant pneumococcal infections and other drug resistant bacterial infections. Another set of tremendous mentors--Rob Breiman, Anne Schuchat, Jay Wenger, Claire [V.] Broome--some of the CDC legends and greats that were available to learn from and learn with. It was a fantastic experience where I really cut my teeth doing both surveillance science and outbreak
control, outbreak investigation.
I did that for two years, and these years between '92 and '96, those four years, were a really seminal time in infectious disease at CDC because this whole concept of emerging infectious diseases was unfolding. The Institute of Medicine issued a report led by Joshua Lederberg in 1992 called "Emerging [Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States]," and highlighted the major drivers of these sort of emerging and reemerging threats. Population growth, urbanization, climate change, travel and trade were a huge part of that; genetic evolution of microbes to become resistant was another part of that; conflict and civil war and strife and population displacement was a big part of that. All of
these really big ecologic issues that for me, harkened back to this holy trinity of pathogens, hosts, and environment being so critical to understanding the macro picture of what we were seeing in terms of epidemic control and infectiousdisease. To their brilliant credit and the brilliance of Josh Lederberg, Nobel laureate, really articulated and saw this big picture. By happenstance, Ralph Bryan, my EIS supervisor, was one of five people who the [National] Center for Infectious Disease director, Jim [James M.] Hughes, identified to write CDC's response to the IOM [Institute of Medicine] report. Through Ralph, I got to actually engage in that process of laying out, what should CDC's strategy and response to emerging infectious disease, how does that shape? What are we going to do? If this is the picture, what do the next ten, twenty years look like?
Together with Ruth Berkelman and Bob [Robert] Pinner and Ralph Bryan and Bob [Robert] Gaynes, those five really led the charge on this. Being an EIS officer with Ralph gave me the opportunity to weigh in and help add some ideas and contribute some thoughts to that process.
In '96, one of the bigger issues that we came up with in that CDC response was the creation of sentinel provider networks. Realizing that emerging infectious disease threats really had to call upon beyond just the public health community for a response--that the clinical community, the academic community, lots of people had to be woven together in tighter networks to create a more comprehensive knowledge base about what was going and where. This was right up
my bailiwick. Two of the four original sentinel provider networks that were proposed were ideas that I had. One was creating an international travel tropical medicine clinical network where we would basically recognize that international travelers and immigrants, refugees and migrants who were crossing geography, they were also crossing epidemiologic divides. They were coming from places where burden was high and science and diagnostics were lower, to places in the West where the burden was lower, but the capability for detect, prevent and respond was higher. The idea of this network was to weave that together to see travelers as sentinels for what might be going on in silence or hidden in other parts of the world. This was sort of a perfect fit--I had been working in
travel tropical medicine and migration clinics since I was a medical student, and I knew that each of our clinical experiences was rich and interesting, but the sample size was too small to actually weave that picture together. One of the first things I did when I came here in '92 was work at Emory with Phyllis [E.] Kozarsky in the travel and tropical medicine clinic there, as a result of this response of sentinel networks, that we really needed a sentinel network that could link clinics like Phyllis' clinic, like the clinics I worked in in Seattle and in Virginia and all these other places. The data from all those clinics should be tied, the diagnosis and the itinerary and the source of exposure and the timing should all be tied together into a global network. That network became GeoSentinel in 1996, was funded, and I was sort of building and
working and trying to craft that as a global surveillance network.
The other global surveillance sentinel provider network we talked about, again, harking back a little to my early childhood days and my dad's experience in Mexico, was the huge percentage of the foreign-born population in the US that was actually Mexican-born, and the world's busiest international border was the US-Mexico border. Our sister countries were tightly woven together epidemiologically, geographically, and in some regards, culturally as well. Yet there was still a big void on what surveillance happened across the border. Wecreated another network together with Jay McAuliffe, who now had been recruited to CDC; Steve [Stephen] Waterman, who was a state epi [epidemiologist] for California and a former EIS officer; and we created something called BIDS, the
Bi-national Infectious [Disease] Surveillance system, initially the Border Infectious Disease Surveillance system. We took advantage of local, city, state and federal partnerships in public health along the border zone to create a sort of shared epidemiologic unit and prioritize certain diseases with common case definitions for shared surveillance.
There were four sentinel provider networks that were proposed in CDC's response to emerging infectious diseases: an ER [emergency room] network; an IDSA [Infectious Disease Society of America] network, which Bob Pinner had sort of come up with and led on; and then the GeoSentinel global tropical medicine network and a BIDS network, which I had taken the lead on. These were maturing and being birthed around '96.
Then another one of these great, sort of fateful accidents happened. Jim Hughes, who was the director for the National Center for Infectious Disease, who I also
credit as being a critical mentor and a wise, prominent leader in infectious disease for me, had taken the somewhat defunct Foreign Quarantine Service that had been sitting in the Center for Preventive Services, another place where the TB [tuberculosis] program was, and it sat there pretty much dormant from 1967 when it came to CDC until about 1996. When David Sencer came over in the sixties and was consolidating, he pulled the Foreign Quarantine Service into the agency, but there's a famous surgeon general quote that said, "the war on infectious disease is over" in the late sixties, and that we don't need a Foreign Quarantine Service in that regard. We're eradicating smallpox, antibiotics are
being discovered rapidly and they still work, childhood immunization programs are taking off eradicating measles, mumps, rubella, etcetera, etcetera, and we're winning. We've got this one, it's a wrap--which might have been absolutely true in 1967, notably before the era of jet travel, before the era of [high-speed] planes and before all the drivers in emerging infections. The Foreign Quarantine Service was essentially dismantled in the late sixties, sat quietly with a handful--probably less than a dozen people. And in 1996, Jim Hughes had the Foreign Quarantine Service back in the National Center for Infectious Disease. He approached me and a couple of other people--Bob [Robert B.] Wainwright, who was a division director in the Artic Investigations Program. He knew that I was particularly interested in this space of international
migration, immigrant, refugee, migrant health, in setting up global tropical surveillance systems, tropical medicine clinics linked to shared data. And I was very attached and wed to the challenge and the problem of emerging infectious diseases. The opportunity came up to be part of the rebuilding of the ForeignQuarantine Service, which had a several hundred year history; to be reinvented as we went into the twenty-first century with a whole different set of threat pictures. Global migration became an entity that needed to be studied and characterized. The movement of people, animal and things was fundamentally different in every way: speed and volume, moving from sea-based travel to jet air travel, where people and pathogens and things could move around the globe shorter than the incubation period of most of those threats. Which meant that the idea of quarantine, which was established formally in the fourteenth century
during the Black Plague epidemic, was that you hold the ship out of port for forty days and by doing that the pathogen burns out. Whoever survived is lucky enough, they get let in and fumigated, and that's your defense against importation and spread. It worked in the fourteenth century through maybe perhaps the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it wasn't going to work in the twenty-first century, and it needed to be fundamentally redesigned. That opportunity came up for me in '96 when I moved from the Division of Bacterial Diseases to a new Foreign Quarantine Service, which we reinvented and called the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, and I've been there ever since.
Q: Gotcha. That's a brilliant little summation of where you guys came from.
CETRON: Perhaps not so little, but it is a summation. [laughter]
Q: True.
CETRON: It's been a great ride in that regard because it offered an opportunity to rethink on a level that I like to engage is big, system level thinking, looking at macro-level problems and trying to figure out what systems can be reengineered and designed for surveillance so that we can detect threats early for prevention, so that we can intervene. And for response so that we can more effectively respond in ways that are cognizant of this trinity of pathogen, host and environment and all those interactions.
Q: What kinds of progress did you make in the first few years?
CETRON: Well, we matured these systems like GeoSentinel and BIDS and successfully were able to get funding and grow them widely internationally. We had good surveillance systems. We started developing datasets that would define
the movement patterns. We started across government and non-governmental entities that had access to movement data. We needed to basically define the migration of people, animal, and things, and there were datasets out there, but they were locked away in a narrow silo of special interest space. I wanted to be able to get those datasets into public health awareness. So we worked with the airline industry and were able to capture International [Air] Transport Association, IATA, data of all the international air routes by airport. What volume was leaving from A and going to B. We were able to do similar things with the cargo and with animal shipments and with all sorts of exchange of trade. We started looking at the challenge of defining the epidemiology of movement, and we built out a number of systems to not only curate them and anchor them in time
and place and update them, but also to integrate them with other systems. We were developing surveillance systems for disease burden and looking at other projects that had mapped disease burden by geography. And then we were developing these movement databases by air, land and sea, border crossing datasets and airplane datasets and rail and cargo movement datasets and things like that. Looking into shipping records of what was coming in as imported animals, from where and what threats did they potentially represent as they were translocated across these epidemiologic divides.
We began a project that was conceived more than a decade ago called BioMosaic, which was a project of being able to look and integrate multiple big datasets that are all sharing a common factor of a GPS [global positioning system] location at the most granular level and a timestamp. If you had time and place,
which was just a fundamental epidemiologic principle, if you could get who, what, when and where linked together across these big datasets, you would suddenly have that picture and be better able to anticipate, if something emerged in A, was it likely to go somewhere? If it went somewhere, where would the next stop be? If it arrived at that next place, in whom would it bearriving? What type of person? If it arrived in that person, what's the likelihood of it finding fertile ground and soil in terms of spreading? That was the challenge that we were starting--we wanted to build out that picture. We wanted to be able to forecast around emerging infectious disease by moving back the clock. We wanted to understand what the risk of a threat, where something was likely to emerge based on these environmental factors, the overlap of pathogen, host, environment, temperature, vector, disease, those kinds of
things, social interactions, disruption, and then say, what would be the trajectory of that pathogen likely moving somewhere else? Where would it go? It turns out, although the US may not be the place that most things will emerge from, we don't have as many of the drivers exactly here for new emergence compared to say Southeast Asia or places on the Africa subcontinent because of the interactions between humans and animals, between the sort of contextual setting. Because we are so highly connected as a country, maybe the most highlyglobally connected country on the planet, we would likely be the next place it would be seen. And it's possible we would be the first place that it was diagnosed in terms of with the public health infrastructure and the tools and capacity we have.
This idea of building an international network, understanding movement of people, animals and things and travel and trade, protecting the homeland from a
classic quarantine regulatory mandate, but also understanding, what is actually going on in a shrinking globe, and where do we need to apply public health tools at the source? This really became the focal mission of our program. We just started adding--I think in '96 we had maybe a dozen people, the number of quarantine stations had been reduced dramatically in the late sixties as I mentioned, and we started adding them strategically. We elicited support from the Institute of Medicine with Jim Hughes fervently behind this rebuilding process in order to develop a more robust strategy for twenty-first century threats. This was driven by the recognition that there were potential threats not only from Mother Nature, but also man-made threats in terms of use of biologic weapons, potentially insecure stocks of dangerous pathogens like
smallpox as infrastructure was falling apart in certain places. Being able to do these types of anticipatory response plans really required thinking about this globalized picture, thinking about globalization and its contribution to theinfectious disease threat and the health security, not only of the US, but the health security of the globe. That became sort of our anchoring point, and we grew the program out of the dust shells of 1996 into a program that was more able to respond to the kinds of threats that we have seen since that time. Learning from the anthrax attacks and then SARS and then monkeypox introduced through this bizarre thing, which basically, giant Gambian pouched rats from one
place move into the exotic pet trade and are cohabitating with prairie dogs sucked up out of holes in their habitat in the [American] West and spreading monkeypox from pouched rats from Africa to domestic prairie dogs exported to Japan and to pet stores all across the US. That story is the story of emerging infectious disease in the twenty-first century, and our program was just beginning to be better poised to be able to define that problem. We were defining it horizontally while at the same time collaborating with and engaging heavily with this deep vertical expertise of programs that were pathogen-specific around the agency. We were looking at the populations and the movement and the trajectory and the interactions and the sort of social milieu, and Inger [K. Damon]'s group was looking at the specific high consequence pathogens, or somebody else's group was looking at the bug itself, and we were
bringing a better understanding of who the hosts were and what the environment of movement and exchange was. That, for me, was so satisfying: to be able to round out the deep vertical expertise and pathogen-specific expertise that exists at this agency almost unparalleled to anywhere in the world with this newly appreciated, almost socio-anthropological framework in which all of that was occurring. That was like, what I had been dreaming of since I was a kid.
Q: I really like that image that puts in my head of the horizontal and the vertical ways of understanding the spread of these diseases. Were there some early--was it always smooth when you were trying to integrate those?
CETRON: Never smooth.
Q: Never smooth?
CETRON: Never smooth, right. And not because--you know, the friction doesn't come necessarily from turf battles. There's the usual stuff of who's in whose
space. That's not so much of the things that leaded to rocky--to make the road a little rocky. Part of it is that some data is understood or known, but it's only known in a narrow context, and some of the horizontal stuff are data that needs to be acquired from a variety of sources, some of which are dated, some of which are updated. Some of which come with a large margin of error and uncertainty and sampling bias, and some of which are really systematically collected. Some of which are hard to get because people don't want to disclose things around national origin or census data, which richly has country of birth. Public health data is not always as richly informed around some of these variables because of the consequences of stigma or legality or status or these other things. It's really important for public health to have access to that information to be able
to define it epidemiologically, but it's really important to be able to use itappropriately as well. The challenge is really about building the horizontal warp on this in so many ways in the public health sphere from scratch. It really didn't exist. Finding quality transportation data was really hard initially. Now we've gone through the process of curating it, we have other systems to define it. Really identifying who's moving and how and in what time frame. Sometimes it's easier to know who comes in than who goes out of the country. These types of things. We were early when we were trying to do this in the mobile devicearena, which positioned people. Now we have better tools to define that mobility, but we still face these issues around the privacy struggles. How do you responsibly use identifiable mobile information, de-identified to protect it, but still identified enough to have an appreciation of who's moving from
where to where and when? Those are big social issues, big privacy issues, big considerations. The rockiness around this.
Also, updating the regulatory framework. When I came into the program in '96, the quarantine regulations hadn't been substantively revised in more than fifty years. We were still dealing with a whole set of stuff on the books that represented a threat picture from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century, but not a threat picture that was commensurate with the twenty-first century pathogen emergence. We had to go through this huge regulatory process to revise that. There were a lot of vested interests that were willing to--we had to do contact tracing on airplanes of people who were exposed to pathogens while they were on the move, but then quickly scattered. It wasn't always easy to get that information captured and find people, and you
have this narrow window. If you've got somebody exposed to SARS on a plane and it's got a high consequence of killing them, and when they get sick they are likely to spread it through respiratory means to other people, you need to find them quickly, be able to isolate them, identify their contacts, potentially monitor all the contacts and the tracings for a period for symptom onset, and offer something in exchange for cooperation in order to prevent spread. And youhave a narrow time window to do it. With something like a pandemic of influenza, you have an especially narrow time window where people can spread either twenty-four hours before they even manifest their first symptom, and by two days later, they're already fully contagious. That's an epidemic that will rapidly escalate. Being able to efficiently put together the datasets that are needed for this type of contact tracing, movement, monitoring, all that stuff, is
pretty challenging. It's not been smooth, but we've been deliberate and persistent and have taken advantage of the fact of these rapidly ensuing global emerging threats to not only make progress in dealing with that epidemic at that time in that setting, but take advantage of the lessons we have learned, the gaps that existed in trying to do that job and closing that gap before the next emerging pathogen comes along.
Q: I'm interested in some of these lessons that were learned from '96 up until the time of Ebola. What's particularly interesting to me is the idea of the vested interests and trying to get data from someone like an airline, for instance, on passenger data, when that airline might be reluctant to give up that passenger data. Or, I don't know, I'm sure that there are tons of other examples.
CETRON: Oh there are, yeah, lots of stories like this.
Q: Do you have any specific examples you could point to where you said, from this interaction, we learned this about dealing with interests?
CETRON: I would say from all these interactions, what I've learned is the importance of balancing the interests of containment and control with the interests of compassion and care and respect at the individual level. What I've learned is that these aren't dichotomies--they aren't either/or premises. If you go into these engagements with this idea of, I have the right and the power, and in order to control this, this is what we're going to do, and you have to give me that data and information, when the perspective on the other side is, I've got interests that need protecting, whether they are privacy interests around the individual, whether they are business interests, whatever those are, youneed to be able to respect that. No, in confrontation, I'm not going to give you
that. I'm going to look at all the legal means that I can withhold, and you're going to look at all the legal means that you can force it and compel it, and most of it ends in a standstill. Coming to truly appreciate that these are false dichotomies, that there are ways to find the overlap of those Venn circles, those Venn diagrams, there's a huge amount of overlap where it's in the individual's interest, it's in the company's interest or the private sector's interest, and it's in the public interest for us to be cooperating. That actually, everybody can win and that you don't have to have either control or care, you can have care and compassion and control and containment living in the same space. Most of it is about finding where that intersection is. And also, being mindful that you want to be playing in that intersecting space in the least restrictive means that you can in order to accomplish your objectives. If you can accomplish something with a voluntary request with ninety-eight percent
compliance and no need to bring in legal and law enforcement and all these other compelling approaches, but you can make an argument voluntarily, which also is in the interest of the individual, the victim, as well as in the interest of the community at large, then why issue an order and create a conflicting situation or a confrontational situation? If the disease can be contained with something short of one hundred percent compliance, don't have to go for one hundred percent compliance, go for voluntary and build goodwill, build trust. Because the building of the goodwill is going to go so much further than the bankruptcy of trust will. That lesson has played out for me over and over in so many ways, in so many times. I think that's really clearly true, avoid the sense of these false dichotomies.
When I look at the job--and the director of the quarantine program has the largest regulatory responsibility at CDC. It's atypical for this agency to have regulatory responsibility, it's often more a technical agency, but it inherited that when it inherited the quarantine service fifty years ago. The questions that come with those kinds of responsibilities for me, the ones that are obvious when you have regulatory program is about authority. What's my legal authority in this space? May I do this? Is it permitted? Another question that you come when you start thinking about that is, what's my capacity to implement these regulations? Do I actually have the resources and capacities? A lot of times, I think, regulatory programs get stuck on the may I and can I, and they don't ask the third question, which is the most important question, which is, should I do
this? Is this the right thing to do in the spirit of epidemic control? In which case, the regulation just becomes another tool for prevention in terms of looking at the epidemic. It's not the endpoint in and of itself. It's not simply having a regulation to have it or having an authority to enforce it, it's the, should I do this. Once you ask that question first--what should we be doing--then you can go back and say, do we have permission to do it and if not, is there a way to get it or does somebody else have permission that we can leverage to do it? If we don't have the capacity, but we need to be doing this, then what do we do to find partners to grow this capacity? How do we get that? By putting that question first, which I think is the fundamentally most important question, you get down to other aspects of should. If yes we should, and then we can figure out we may and we can, the next question is, how do we do this in the least restrictive means? How do we implement an ethical quarantine
program that respects individual rights while concurrently protecting the public at large? Every big epidemic that I've been involved in at CDC has been an epidemic of disease followed by an epidemic of fear and an epidemic of stigma. Any time we try to approach only one of those, we miss the opportunity for a healthy response. We have to be doing what we know technically to control the epidemic of disease, but if we miss the epidemic of fear that's going on among the non-affected and don't address those concerns, or we miss the epidemic of stigma that's turning victims into vectors and stigmatizing and marginalizing, we drive surveillance and reporting and cooperation and all the voluntary measures you need to get things under control, you drive that completely underground if you stigmatize and dismiss people and see them as vectors rather than victims. This balance, this tension of, how do you have an ethical and a
successful and effective isolation and quarantine program? How do you prevent against importation and spread while minimizing the impact on individual liberties, trade and travel, all of those things? Instead of seeing them as the dichotomy in which they are often presented, "we've got to build this, we've got to lock it down, we've got to have a full-on quarantine containment and that's the only way to do it," and that's usually not true. Usually, what's true is we need trust and cooperation, we need engagement, we need multiple partners, and we need to find the areas of the Venn diagram where the individual's interest overlap with the interest of society because they're there and they are substantial. Holding the "both/and" rather than the "either/or" in this process is just a paramount principle.
Q: I want to thank you. I think that we won't have enough time to get to Ebola if that's okay with you.
CETRON: Yeah.
Q: Would you be willing to come back if you had--
CETRON: Sure, we can talk about Ebola later.
Q: Okay, I know you have a crazy schedule.
CETRON: No, that's fine.
Q: But I think that actually is a brilliant place, that I think we've set the stage now to be talking about what happened in this one particular incident starting in 2014.
CETRON: Okay sure, it's been very enjoyable sharing these ideas with you.
Q: It's been very enjoyable listening.
CETRON: All right, I'll see you next time.
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