In 1999, I had the epidemiological success of a lifetime while working for an NGO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) at the peak of their war that involved five neighboring armies. In a rural district, we documented that around 1,600 children had died of measles in the previous few weeks. Immediately, UNICEF pledged to get the vaccine needed, and my NGO and the Ministry of health prepared to vaccinate the population. After 3 weeks of preparation, UNICEF announced that they had searched across the entire African continent and there was no measles vaccine available.
Five years earlier, I had finished the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Services fellowship or EIS. The two-year fellowship, started in 1951, was designed to create a close-nit cadre of public health professionals and spread them across the centers and branches with the various areas of expertise that constitute the CDC. Somehow, 60 trainees at a time managed to build the CDC into a tight-knit, expert community. While there, I had met “the” CDC expert on measles control, Stan. I called his office with a satellite phone and, miraculously, he answered. I explained the situation and pleaded, “Stan, I desperately need 60,000 doses of measles vaccine!” He asked me to call him back in four hours. When I did, and he gleefully said, “Les, I found you 60,000 doses, and the syringes and vitamin A tablets to go with it.” I was astonished and asked where the vaccine was? It was ready for us to pick up the next day, in UNICEF’s Rwandan warehouse, less than 200 miles away. There were so many elements of this that were astonishing. Still, chief among them was the ability of an American sitting in Atlanta to do in four hours what a large team of UNICEF staff in Africa could not do in three weeks.
The vaccine arrived a couple of days later, the vaccination program was undertaken, and the measles outbreak stopped completely, probably preventing 4-6000 child deaths. My chance connection that empowered this response was exactly the kind of CDC-based human network envisioned a half-century earlier and exactly what the EIS was intended to do. Most of my EIS peers have had similar experiences.