NYT's CDC Officer's (Larry Altman) Sour Grapes
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: NYT's CDC Officer's (Larry Altman) Sour Grapes
Date: Apr 6, 2010 6:13 AM
ARTICLE BELOW; UNSCIENCE TUESDAY in
THE NEW YORK BEHIND-THE-TIMES...
-------------------------------------
Altman is a CDC officer. This is
why the TRUTH about Lyme (or even
about the Blumenthal lawsuit) has
never been reported in the NYTimes.
Now that the EU and the WHO has slammed
IDSA over the failed LYMErix/HIV
and failed Tuberculosis/Lyme vaccines,
we watch Altman try patch up their
reputation.
'Which, to us, is The Most Excellent
Way these lying incompetent fools
could have admitted they were lying
scientifically incompetent fools :)))
EU and WHO Slam IDSA:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=link&linkname=pubmed_pubmed&uid=20338147&ordinalpos=1&log$=relatedarticles_seeall&logdbfrom=pubmed
IDSA says,
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/652237
"Whoops. We're idiots and no one believed
all our lies about vaccines and antibiotic
resistance, heh, heh."
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
http://www.relapsingfever.org
=================================================
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/health/06docs.html?src=me&pagewanted=print
April 5, 2010
An Elite Team of Sleuths, Saving Lives in Obscurity
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.
Millions of people know what C.D.C. and F.D.A. stand for. Far fewer
recognize E.I.S., though they may owe their lives to it.
The E.I.S. is the Epidemic Intelligence Service, an arm of the federal
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its cadre of 160 elite
medical detectives — many of them young doctors at the start of their
careers — serve two-year hitches that are part adventure, part
drudgery.
Suitcases packed, they are poised to fly anywhere on short notice to
investigate outbreaks of pneumonia, diarrhea, high fevers, mysterious
rashes and many other health threats. Borrowing a term from news
reporting, E.I.S. detectives like to call themselves “shoe-leather
epidemiologists;” they also like to wear ties and lapel pins
displaying their logo — a hole in the well-worn sole of a shoe over a
map of the world.
Since its creation in 1951, the service has become a bulwark in the
nation’s defense system against disease, often acting as the public’s
emergency room. Its doctors have helped identify Legionnaires’
disease, Lyme disease, and toxic shock syndrome from superabsorbent
tampons; stop outbreaks of diphtheria and other diseases before they
could spread uncontrollably; discover the deadly Ebola and Lassa
viruses; and trace paralyzing cases of polio to defective batches of
the Salk vaccine. Other E.I.S. investigations have led the Food and
Drug Administration to remove potentially lethal products from the
market.
Indeed, the E.I.S. “may have saved your life, though you were probably
unaware of it,” Mark Pendergrast writes in his new book, “Inside the
Outbreaks,” the first history of the program, being published next
week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
I was among the 500 graduates of the service whom Mr. Pendergrast
interviewed for the book. (He has no connection to the program.) The
book describes a number of triumphs — and occasional roadblocks — told
chronologically as vignettes, with bits of history interspersed.
Among them are examples of government officials’ suppressing critical
health information — and a few surprises about the E.I.S.’s
contributions to public health, including some that may come as news
to the program’s more than 3,000 graduates.
For example, few colleagues I asked knew that an E.I.S. investigation
of a 1953 outbreak of nervous-system damage in children led Chicago to
create the nation’s first poison control center. Pediatricians had
assumed the cause was viral encephalitis; a medical sleuth, visiting
the children’s homes and neighborhood, discovered that many were
eating paint chips containing lead and correctly linked the outbreak
to lead poisoning.
The service had been founded two years earlier by Dr. Alexander D.
Langmuir, a supremely self-confident epidemiologist who had gotten his
start in the New York State Health Department and later taught at
Johns Hopkins.
Seizing on a frightening outbreak of hemorrhagic fever that had killed
3,000 United Nations troops in Korea, Dr. Langmuir convinced federal
officials that the nation needed a quick-response squadron of
epidemiologists to investigate outbreaks. At the outset, E.I.S.
recruits earned military credit; even today they sometimes wear
uniforms and have military ranks. Many found the service a career-
changing experience, because they realized they could help far more
people through public health than they could in clinical practice.
Then and now, many graduates of the program stay for careers at the
C.D.C., while others form the backbone of state and local health
departments and become leaders in academic medical centers.
Tall, deep-voiced and domineering, Dr. Langmuir was a showman who
delighted in hearing E.I.S. officers relate their adventures riding
camels and exhuming bodies. But Mr. Pendergrast leaves no doubt that
he was a genius and a visionary.
To colleagues who said that vaccines and antibiotics were making
infectious diseases obsolete, he replied that the field still provided
“a happy hunting ground for major discoveries and contributions.” The
new service quickly took on his personality.
In the early 1950s, for example, an E.I.S. investigating team provided
surprising evidence that malaria had virtually disappeared from the
United States, overturning the conventional wisdom that it was still a
leading cause of fever throughout the South.
At the same time, Dr. Langmuir made some decisions that would probably
be condemned today. In 1955, the future of the new Salk polio vaccine
was suddenly thrown into doubt when some recipients became paralyzed,
apparently by a virus the vaccine maker had failed to kill.
Dr. Langmuir swiftly set up an investigative team that found that the
defective vaccine came from Cutter Laboratories, one of six drug
companies licensed to make and distribute vaccine. The five other
manufacturers were allowed to resume production and sales.
But cases also occurred among recipients of the polio vaccine made by
Wyeth Laboratories. In a little-known attempt to salvage the overall
program, Dr. Langmuir suppressed reports of these cases.
In 1962, Dr. Langmuir publicly supported the Sabin oral polio vaccine
despite evidence that it had led to eight cases of paralysis. He
buried the data in a paper published two years later.
Dr. Langmuir retired from the service in 1970, but its propensity for
secrecy lived on. In 1985, after a baffling outbreak of salmonellosis
linked to salad bars in Oregon, E.I.S. investigators found a vial of
salmonella with the same bacterial fingerprints in the laboratory of a
nurse who had worked for the cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. the
service refused to report its investigation for years, on the ground
that it would provoke copycat attacks.
The service’s reputation was bolstered after the 9/11 attacks, when it
played a leading role in the investigation of the deliberate release
of anthrax spores through the postal system. But its accomplishments
are generally based on strengthening the nation’s system to report
common and unusual diseases, and then discerning patterns of infection
and spread.
Gradually, the E.I.S. expanded to include veterinarians, nurses,
dentists, statisticians, social workers, even lawyers. Depending on
the nature of the outbreak, its detectives may conduct door-to-door
interviews and surveys, mapping cases and venturing abroad.
When I was a member of the service, in 1963-65, for instance, two of
my colleagues went to Bolivia to investigate a plague outbreak and
bring back a sample of the causative bacterium. To get it, they had to
exhume a body to remove a finger and isolate the bacterium from the
marrow. The specimen eventually became part of the collection of
potential agents at the government’s biological warfare center at in
Maryland.
Despite his penchant for secrecy, Dr. Langmuir knew the value of
publicity, and his subordinates learned from his example. During an
outbreak of hepatitis from raw shellfish taken from Raritan Bay in New
Jersey in 1961, Dr. D. A. Henderson, an E.I.S. graduate then working
at the C.D.C., likened the risk to “playing Russian roulette on the
half shell.” His pithy comment, widely reported in the news media,
earned a mild reprimand from his superiors. (Dr. Henderson later led
the W.H.O. team that eradicated smallpox, and after 9/11 he advised
the United States government on bioterrorism.)
The E.I.S. was Alexander Langmuir’s family. He demanded full loyalty
and was upset when one of his “boys” left.
When Dr. E. Russell Alexander announced that he was leaving to join
the faculty at the University of Washington, Dr. Langmuir told him he
would “never make it in academia.” (The prediction proved wrong.) And
when Dr. Henderson began organizing the team that eventually
eradicated smallpox, Dr. Langmuir opposed involving the E.I.S. and
told his subordinate to take what he wanted and get out. The two later
reconciled.
I, too, was a victim. When I joined the E.I.S. in 1963, Dr. Langmuir
appointed me editor of The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, over
which he had won control in a bureaucratic battle with another agency.
He wanted to change its emphasis on vital statistics, which he said
made for dull reading, and he preached the importance of promptly
feeding information to the public on a “need-to-know basis.” So I
included many reports of current outbreaks, in effect making the
report a weekly newspaper.
In those days, doctors were not required to report cases of rubella,
even though it can lead to severe birth defects in the babies of
pregnant women who contract it. So I played journalist, calling
epidemiologists in many states to track the disease’s spread and
obstetricians to learn that some were performing first-trimester
abortions.
My accounts unnerved and angered Dr. Langmuir, and he contradicted his
early statements by insisting that the weekly report stick to its
archive function. He sent me packing to help run a measles
immunization program in Africa. I accepted the punishment
enthusiastically, never expecting that my African adventures would
eventually make me part of the Henderson team that eradicated
smallpox.
By the time of his death, in 1993, Dr. Langmuir had soured on the
service he created, saying it had outlived its usefulness and should
be abolished. Yet as other countries have adopted smaller versions of
the E.I.S., his contributions to global health have outlived him, and
so has his formidable legacy as a giant of public health.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci