20 12 2286 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/7dbbeec9f1a1bb97a2196cb5b0161873.jpg 53968acc73f21793d49c118d28adea22 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Height 598 Width 900 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Photographs A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource REUNION – 2006 Subject The topic of the resource Reunion Description An account of the resource A color photograph of David Sencer (left) and Steve Blount (right) at the Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers held in Atlanta, Georgia. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gathany, Jim (Photographer) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 15th, 2006 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers (2006 : Atlanta, Georgia) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 226770 bytes image/jpeg Language A language of the resource No Linguistic Content Type The nature or genre of the resource photographs digital images still image Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/156xq emory:156xq https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/9aea2f40f42969c3c30d561aa8b6fcbd.jpg c0bfc75d028b91456ea3ffc7674ea4f6 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Height 598 Width 900 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Photographs A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Type The nature or genre of the resource photographs digital images still image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 15th, 2006 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/156zv emory:156zv Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 252386 bytes image/jpeg Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gathany, Jim (Photographer) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers (2006 : Atlanta, Georgia) Title A name given to the resource REUNION – 2006 Description An account of the resource A color photograph of Bill Watson (left), Elvin Hilyer (center), and Nancy Hilyer (right) at the Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers held in Atlanta, Georgia. Subject The topic of the resource Reunion Language A language of the resource No Linguistic Content https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/0d095b5cad2778f0d37de3dc123cf2a6.jpg 42698b863d7b11399456e3ac7b5a7baf Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Height 598 Width 900 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Photographs A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Type The nature or genre of the resource photographs digital images still image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 15th, 2006 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/15703 emory:15703 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 271935 bytes image/jpeg Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gathany, Jim (Photographer) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers (2006 : Atlanta, Georgia) Title A name given to the resource REUNION – 2006 Description An account of the resource A color photograph of Deane Hutchins (left), Virginia Hutchins (center), and Jim Hicks (right) at the Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers held in Atlanta, Georgia. Subject The topic of the resource Reunion Language A language of the resource No Linguistic Content https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/2de566c5682cba84d77993c99ab56eec.jpg b1c833b086db08c1030d888a6583ca22 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Height 900 Width 598 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Photographs A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Type The nature or genre of the resource photographs digital images still image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 15th, 2006 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/15717 emory:15717 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 225879 bytes image/jpeg Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gathany, Jim (Photographer) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers (2006 : Atlanta, Georgia) Title A name given to the resource REUNION – 2006 Description An account of the resource A color photograph of Jeannie Lythcott (left) and Bill Watson (right) at the Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers held in Atlanta, Georgia. Subject The topic of the resource Reunion Language A language of the resource No Linguistic Content https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/506dafb699aa09e9a676c63ac6d4a63b.jpg 76858e2fc46eea5cc0311de9bded947f Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Height 598 Width 900 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Photographs A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Type The nature or genre of the resource photographs digital images still image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 15th, 2006 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/1572c emory:1572c Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 188877 bytes image/jpeg Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gathany, Jim (Photographer) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers (2006 : Atlanta, Georgia) Title A name given to the resource REUNION – 2006 Description An account of the resource A color photograph of Julie Gerberding, CDC Director 2002-2009, at the Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers held in Atlanta, Georgia. Subject The topic of the resource Reunion Language A language of the resource No Linguistic Content https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/3afbc154c17039742673c43cef499df5.jpg 0781330ac831bb1b3b6d9d55fe1069e6 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Height 598 Width 900 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Photographs A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Type The nature or genre of the resource photographs digital images still image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 15th, 2006 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/1573h emory:1573h Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 321540 bytes image/jpeg Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gathany, Jim (Photographer) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers (2006 : Atlanta, Georgia) Title A name given to the resource REUNION – 2006 Description An account of the resource RA color photograph of the front table, from left to right: Jay Friedman, Elaine Friedman, Jane Morris, Leo Morris, Mike Lane and Lila Lane, at the Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers held in Atlanta, Georgia. Subject The topic of the resource Reunion Language A language of the resource No Linguistic Content https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/f595e6103081bcd58191259925d89c75.jpg 250ce488b579eb34ad194f3340145d03 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Height 598 Width 900 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Photographs A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Type The nature or genre of the resource photographs digital images still image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 15th, 2006 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/1574n emory:1574n Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 271370 bytes image/jpeg Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gathany, Jim (Photographer) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers (2006 : Atlanta, Georgia) Title A name given to the resource REUNION – 2006 Description An account of the resource A color photograph, from left to right: Jay Friedman, Elaine Friedman, Jane Morris, and Leo Morris, at the Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers held in Atlanta, Georgia. Subject The topic of the resource Reunion Language A language of the resource No Linguistic Content https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/52710b06704c0ea48a777ccff13e43b4.jpg 9a63f2234dda8a828c4f8d96b2b329a5 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Height 600 Width 900 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Photographs A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Type The nature or genre of the resource photographs digital images still image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 15th, 2006 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/1575s emory:1575s Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 551752 bytes image/jpeg Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gathany, Jim (Photographer) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers (2006 : Atlanta, Georgia) Title A name given to the resource REUNION – 2006 Description An account of the resource A color photograph of the Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers in front of the Reception Emory Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Subject The topic of the resource Reunion Language A language of the resource No Linguistic Content https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/889405da4a1ea7dfaf1036c45a5fe028.pdf e2d0cc373e0bf0d597b5d2cda422a119 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Guinea Worm Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Guinea worm is poised to be the second human disease to be eradicated. The Carter Center, with partners like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, began leading the international campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease in 1986. That year, it was estimated that 3.5 million cases occurred annually in 21 countries in Africa and Asia. Guinea worm disease is a painful and debilitating parasite that is contracted by drinking Guinea worm infected-water. There is no vaccine or drug to prevent the disease, only behavior change through health education. Working with the ministries of health and impacted communities, Guinea worm disease has been reduced by more than 99 percent. <span>During 2020, only 12 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in Chad, a dramatic 75 percent reduction from 48 the previous year. Eleven cases were reported in Ethiopia, and one each in South Sudan, Angola, Mali, and Cameroon. As for Guinea worm infections in animals, Chad reported 1,570 (1,507 domestic dogs, 61 domestic cats, and two wild cats), Ethiopia reported 15 (eight domestic dogs, three domestic cats, four baboons), and Mali reported eight infected domestic dogs. </span>The buttons to the right will connect you to a searchable database of oral histories, photographs and media. To conduct an advanced search, use the link in the blue navigation bar above. Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used. .</p> </div> Documents Government Records Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource BOOKLET – Rural Areas Description An account of the resource “Water Supply Options for Guinea Worm Eradication and Health Improvement in Rural Areas,” a forty-three-page manual with graphics, charts, and text on water supplies and Guinea worm eradication. Produced by the Global 2000, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), U.S. Peace Corps. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Global 2000, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNiCEF and the US Peace Corps Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context David J. Sencer CDC Museum 2017.048.185 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Global 2000, CDC, UNICEF and US Peace Corp https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/3e027e382c5eed16196c06d8cc7535a9.jpg f7d78b88df4e468df04a13d6b5b8f263 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/9a83f5a9b21cf972ec1dc75d92eeb079.pdf c22f3d531c3cfceeb1968d7187a26c39 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound. <pre><strong> Interview Transcript </strong> This is an interview with Ann Lourie on July 13, 2006, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, about her involvement with the West African Smallpox Eradication Project. The interview is being conducted as part of a reunion marking the 40th anniversary of the launch of the program. The interviewer is Deborah Gould. Gould: Would you describe your early life, where you were born and had your education through high school? Lourie: I was born on Long Island, Flushing, New York, and I lived there until I was 10. My father died when I was 10, and my mother remarried, and we lived in Connecticut for a while. I went to a boarding school for 3 years, from the 7th to the 9th grade Finally, we moved back to Scarsdale and White Plains, New York. I went to high school at Scarsdale High School, and I went to college. Gould: How did you and your husband become involved in the smallpox eradication effort? Lourie: Well, we got married in 1960 and we had 3 children soon after, 2 years apart and 18 months apart. My husband was in the Public Health Service after he finished his internship, and then he went back and got a Master's in Public Health at Johns Hopkins. Our children were 5, 3, and 2. We discussed that we would like to do something really exciting before our children got to school age. Being interested in public health, he just heard about the program with CDC at that time, and we both thought it would be a terrific idea to do this. Gould: I understand you lived in Chad. Is that correct? Lourie: Yes. Gould: Describe what it was like living in Chad with 3 small children. Lourie: Well, it wasn't that bad really. When we first got there, we were in an apartment on the 1st floor, and it was hard because it was very small and very cramped. And the main front door had a space about 2 inches between the floor and the bottom of the door, so in the evening all these frogs would come in under that door, and they'd be jumping all over the room. That was really my first unpleasent experience. But anyway, after a month or so, we got moved into other quarters. There were 2 houses in a compound, 1 with Russell Charter and his wife, and a very nice 1-floor rental house for us. It had a living room, dining room, 2 bedrooms, and a bath. We had a swimming pool between the 2 houses, so that was nice because I taught my kids how to swim. So, physically, it was not that bad. Gould: What about dealing with some of the cultural differences? The markets are so unlike the States, where we've got a Publix or a Kroger grocery store on every corner. Lourie: Well, we had a market. We lived in the capital, which was then called Fort Lamy and is now something else with an N, N'Djamena, I believe. As far as I remember, there were no paved roads. The town was just 1 or 2 streets with little stores on both sides, and the marketplaces. One wonderful thing was that I had a cook and a houseboy who helped, so I didn't have to do laundry or cook. I did go shopping.for food. Occasionally, the cook would go shopping too. Culturally, we had a hard time at first. I started teaching English classes occasionally to adults, and so I needed someone to take care of my children. We had 1 houseboy, but I didn't want to give him that responsibility. So we hired this young girl to be a babysitter and take care of the children while I was gone, and she was there a few days. The kids always had their bath after dinner, and they were all bathed in the same tub. My 2-year-old was still in diapers at the time. So I went in to the bathroom for something. They were all in the tub. And she had taken the diaper and she was rinsing it out in the bathtub, . So, needless to say, she was fired, and I went on to the next. She couldn't help it. . She just didn't know any better. But anyway, we got another houseboy named Bartolomey, really very cute, short, smart little guy, and he wound up helping the other man and also taking care of the kids, and we had him the whole time we were there. Gould: You said the children were 5, 3, and 2? Lourie: When we got there, yes. Gould: And you were there for how long? Lourie: Two years. Gould: What about schooling for the 5-year-old? Lourie: He went to the 1st grade in the French school in town. I taught the Calvert system at home, in English, for the 1st grade, so that when we went back to the States, he could go into the 2nd grade. So he had both the French school and the Calvert system at home. The other 2 children weren't old enough, so they didn't go to school or any other kind of pre-kindergarten or kindergarten. Gould: Did they learn the language? Lourie: Yes. They all could speak basic French, but two of them didn't remember it when we came back. The oldest, who was 7 when we left, can speak fluent French to this day. Gould: That's wonderful. A good skill to have. Lourie: Yes. Gould: What was the toughest problem or problems that you faced? Lourie: I didn't really have any tough problems. Basically, I was living with servants whom I'd never had before in my life. You did had to be very careful what you did with your food, that you washed everything well, that you peeled everything, that you didn't drink water. But there were no real problems. We did go swimming and waterskiing in the Chari River. Now, when I talk about it, people say "You did that? You didn't get schistosomiasis?" And I say, "No." "When we went there, Dr. Pierre Ziegler was there, who was the French counterpart whom Bernie [Bernard Lourie] was working with. He told us that since the water was swift moving, it would be alright.I was talking to Rafe Henderson [Ralph H. Henderson] last night, and he said that he was always in the water and loved the water, and he said, "Oh, it's just fine, and we did this all the time." And that's what we did on the weekends. That was our entertainment. We would go waterskiing and picnicking and swimming in the Chari River with the hippos. Gould: Oh, my goodness! I hear they were pretty vicious. Lourie: Yes, they can be dangerous. We were lucky, we really were. I don't know what was wrong with me at the time. I didn't realize they could be dangerous. But physically, I didn't really have any hardships at home because I had a nice, comfortable house, and I took care of the kids and I was busy doing things with them and teaching them things. I would go out occasionally or play bridge with the gals about once a month. I was very happy. I had a wonderful time; my kids had a wonderful time. There were other American families. Russell and Sharon Charter were the only American families there from our CDC group. There were some ancillary workers, and we did socialize with them occasionally. And then there was Dr. Ziegler and his wife, who were French. We socialized with them a lot on weekends. Gould: So, during this time, was your husband out in the field most of the time? Lourie: Yes. He went out every day with a truck. Sometimes he would be gone for a couple of days. I can't remember any more how long exactly. It could have even been a week that they would go out for. So he would come and go. I only wish that I could have gone, too. Gould: Yes. Lourie: That was my wish. I thought, "Oh, if I didn't have any children, I could go and be with him every day." When he was in town daily, the day ended early. It ended about 2 o'clock. They'd come home, and we'd have our large meal in the afternoon, and that would be it. They would work from early morning, when he was in town, until around 2 in the afternoon. Gould: How early in the morning? Lourie: Quite early, maybe 6 or 7 AM. Gould: Was that a French system? Lourie: I don't know. It was a French colony at the time, and that was just the schedule. Gould: Can you recall any unique experiences or occurrences that you had when you were there that you would like to tell us about? Lourie: Well, besides the frogs, 1 funny thing occurred when we were still in the apartment. We had one houseboy, and while I was gone he had taken our white sneakers and covered them with Elmer's glue and then set them out in the sun to dry because he thought that was polish. They were stiff as a board. That was a funny experience. And then another thing. . .We normally never let the children swim with anyone.but ourselves. But we wanted to be sure that if we left them and they happened to go near the pool, that Bartholomey would know how to swim and what to do. So we asked him, "Can you swim? Do you know how to swim?" He said, "Oh, yes, yes, I can swim." So we took him to the pool. We said, "Okay, show us how you can swim." So he jumped in the pool and he almost drowned because he had no idea how to swim. I guess he was afraid he might lose his job- or he just didn't want to say that he couldn't swim. Just before we left to go back home, we went to a game park with wild animals. I had never been out at all to see the animals. So we had the 3 kids, and I think we were in a little Volkswagen in this park, and it was just the driver and our family. Six of us. We got stuck in the mud sometime during the afternoon, and we couldn't get out. So we were there all night, sleeping in the car. My middle son had an earache, and he was crying most of the night. The next morning, everything had dried up and we were able to get out. We went back to the main place and we said, "Why didn't you send someone out to look for us?" They didn't even know we were out there. Noone at all knew we were gone. So that was a little disconcerting. Gould: Did you encounter any animals during the night? Lourie: No, we didn't. I didn't even get out of the car. We were just huddled in there. Gould: They might have been curious and come up to it to find out what was in the car. That's amazing. It sounds like a wonderful adventure and opportunity. How did participating in the program, and being there, change your life? Lourie: I don't know really how it changed my life. I had traveled before I went to Africa. I'd been to Europe and I'd been to India, so it wasn't a complete culture shock .. But I found the Africans to be extremely warm, extremely friendly. There weren't that many higher-ups in town, and I didn't really socialize with higher-up Africans. But all the people that we had working for us and just had daily contact with, were just extremely nice, extremely open. I thought about the whole experience for a long time after we came back, and I thought it was wonderful for my children because they not only learned French, but they didn't have any prejudices at all when we came home-because in the '60s still- Gould: I hear you. Lourie: And so it was, I think, a good experience for them. And I remember it as being a wonderful time. Gould: What difference do you think it would have made if the spouses and children had not gone to Africa but had stayed home in the United States? Lourie: I think that would have been extremely hard, to be separated for 2 years. I don't think we would have gone if the program had said that I'd have to stay home. . That would have been too hard. Gould: Do you think that would have had an impact on the program at all? Lourie: I don't know. It would be hard to say. Probably. There certainly would have been many more singles. Gould: For that length of time, right. How did you prepare to go over? I mean, you were living in the United States, you had a home, you had a life here. Lourie: Well, we didn't have a home. We never owned a house 'til we came back from Africa. We were always renting. We rented a house in Baltimore, and then we came down here for the orientation. So we didn't have that many possessions, really, before we went over. We had a dog, though, a beagle, and we had to leave him behind. We weren't going to take a dog over to Africa. So that was hard for the children to separate from the dog. We'd had him about 2 or 3 years. Other than that, we didn't prepare, really. We took clothes, and that was it. We hoped we were going to have an adventure. Gould: Wow. It sounds like you did. If you could do this all over again, is there anything that you would change? Lourie: No. I'm sure all the other countries were different. Each country that everybody went to was an entirely different experience. But, no, there wasn't anything that I would change, just that I would have loved to have gone out on the trucks and done what they were doing if I had had no children.. Gould: You mentioned that you were teaching English. Lourie: Yes. Gould: Could you tell me a little bit more about that? Lourie: I can't really remember it that well.. I was trying to remember the other day. There were 2 adults, fairly educated adults, probably schooled in African schooling and they spoke French. They held positions in town, and they just wanted to learn English. I think I taught them in the late afternoon and the evenings, and I did this for a couple of months. But I can't really remember the details of the class. Gould: Had you previously taught? Lourie: No, no. I worked for 4 years before we were married, in bacteriology, but I had never taught before. Gould: So you learned another field while you were there. Lourie: Mm-hmm. Gould: Is there anything else that you would like to add or any particular stories that you would like to tell us about? Lourie: I really can't think of anything in particular, just that it was a wonderful experience. My husband had a marvelous time. And we had fun, too. The family had fun. And as I said, a major attraction was going out on that river every weekend. My 5-year- old learned how to waterski. The other 2 didn't, but he did. And they all swam; they could all swim from the age of 2. Gould: Was that your last time in Africa? Lourie: Yes. I did not go back. Gould: Or your children? Lourie: No, my children haven't gone back to Africa. Gould: Thank you for this interview. You have made a contribution. # # # </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/310128227%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-Wvs5V&amp;color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" width="100%" height="166"></iframe> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound recording - nonmusical interviews Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006-13-07 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/158pz emory:158pz Subject The topic of the resource CDC Smallpox Eradication USAID WHO Life as expatriate wife Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 228263952 bytes audio/x-aiff Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gould, Deborah (Interviewer); CDC; Health Educator Lourie, Ann (Interviewee); CDC; Wife of Epidemiologist Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Centers for Disease Control Reunion of West and Central Africa Smallpox workers (2006 : Atlanta, Georgia) Title A name given to the resource LOURIE, ANN Description An account of the resource Ann Lourie, wife of Bernard Lourie, who served as an Epidemiologist in Chad. Ann speaks of adjusting to life in Chad, living abroad with 3 young children, and relates family adventures. Language A language of the resource English https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/50b3f4ada4d41f0636d0e4d61bc6e2ca.jpg 7079ea50612266f212c4d24ec9e70931 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/0cb9c7a848420abc2241387e68394d57.pdf 834491e360520ec38f1af20e92a67030 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound. <pre><strong> Interview Transcript </strong> This is an interview with Mr. Billy G. Griggs, who was Deputy Director for the Smallpox Eradication Program in West Africa. This interview is being conducted on July 7, 2006, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a part of the 40th anniversary reunion for the launching of the program. The interviewer is Victoria Harden. Harden: Mr. Griggs, I would like to get a little background, to set the stage for your role in the smallpox program. I know you were born in Ripley, Tennessee, on November 20, 1933. Could you, just briefly, give me a little indication about your growing-up years, your pre-college education, who influenced you, how you grew up? Griggs: Well, Ripley is the county seat. Actually, I was born in Ashport, a port on the Mississippi River, 15 miles west of Ripley. And in 1933, this was boondocksville. In every way. Most of the things that came into Ashport came in by river boat. I went to school in Ripley-was bused 15 miles to school. I lived on a farm, of course. I had a rather uneventful, typical farm boy's life. I did all sorts of activities going on with farming. I went to high school at Ripley High School and graduated in 1951. I started to college my freshman year at Union University, which was a Baptist college in Jackson, Tennessee, about 45 miles east of Ripley. I was influenced largely by the pastor at the church, which happened to be located on the farm. He kept pestering me to come to Union. So I went to Union freshman year and met a senior girl, who I was infatuated with. She finished that year and was teaching in Memphis, so I decided Memphis State was probably better than Union. We got married Christmas my sophomore year. I was self-supporting, and I worked my way through college, working all sorts of jobs and I graduated in 4 ½ years. I came out of school with a house, 2 kids, a wife, and no debt, I might add, which is very good for college years. Harden: It certainly is. Griggs: I finished up the undergraduate work in January and decided to go on and do a master's in geography at Memphis State. I did the first semester but I was working, at that point, 48 hours a week at a soybean/cottonseed-oil mill at night. I decided that maybe I'd better slow down just a little bit. I knew there was a job opening down at the Shelby County Health Department for a VD [veneral diseases] investigator. On arrival down at the health department, I found out that not only was there the state job but there was also a federal co-op job vacancy. Tom Davis (from Atlanta) and Press Fish from the Nashville state office were there interviewing for the co-op job. The jobs were virtually the same, in terms of interviewing VD patients, locating their contacts, and referring them in for treatment for VD. The only difference in the state and federal jobs was that the federal job paid $500 a year more than the state job, and at the end of the year you were subject to transfer throughout the United States. This was a cooperative appointment between the State of Tennessee and the federal government. The feds paid the salaries, and you worked literally as a state employee on a local level there, at the City of Memphis. Keep in mind that my motivation for coming down was going through school, working full-time, and making a living. And it was beginning to get a little tiring. I decided that I probably ought to slow down a little bit and finish this master's degree. So I applied for the federal job, thinking that I would just do a year at it, and I'll have my master's, and I'll get on with what I was planning on doing. Harden: Which was? Griggs: At that point I was still thinking possibly about law school. But some things had happened while I was working in a real estate company. I was manager of a rental department at one of the oldest and largest realty companies in Memphis and going to school at night. We had several young lawyers on retainer who were very smart, but they were having a tough time making a living. So I wasn't sure that I wanted to do another 4 years of law school after the master's. So I applied, got the co-op job, and went to work. Two co- ops were hired, I might add. This was mid-June of '56. In early August, late July, Carl Hookings, who was the director of VD there, got a call that l of the co-ops was needed to go to the Mexican border to work with the Bracero Program. There was a pilot project being run to see if Braceros, who were Mexican agricultural workers, could be blood-tested for syphilis at the border. Then you could only have to follow up those scattered throughout the states when they went out from the border. Syphilis was the only blood test they were doing at that time. The Braceros were visually checked for syphilis and gonorrhea by a male nurse coming through. I was married with 2 children. The other young co-op was married with no children, and he made a long pitch to Hookings why it really wasn't in his best interest to go to the border. I didn't have any strong feelings, and I thought the program was going to be over with by the time school started back. So I went out to El Paso. The 2 kids stayed with their grandparents. My wife went with me. She was going to stay 2 weeks and then fly back and take care of the kids. She was a teacher in Memphis. Well, we got to El Paso, and she decided that she didn't really like the idea because the program was going to take longer than we thought. So we made a hurried trip back to Tennessee, got the kids, rented an efficiency apartment, and started work. And, believe me, in those days, things were a little different than working now-a-days. The Braceros came across the border at 6:00 in the morning, went out to the reception center, and we started work. They were processed through, and that meant a complete physical (in terms of looking at them, a chest x-ray, a blood test since we were there to do that), and then they were checked and recruited by the farmers, processed, and then went to the farm that afternoon. The Braceros were all young, male agricultural workers, who were coming in for limited farm work. So our day started at 6:00; usually we were through about midnight. The largest day of processing workers was 4,500 people who came through that kind of process all in one 24-hour period. We finished up in late September or October. And I returned to Memphis. The good thing about the Bracero Program was that Bill Watson [William Watson], who was then the Program Management Officer of the VD program, and I became quite good friends. In the spring, I had taken the federal service entrance exam and made fairly high marks on it. I had gotten a lot of job offers from other agencies, at a considerably higher grade than the VD program co-op salary. Bill and I talked about this, and then Bill had a long conversation with Johannes Stuart, who was in Washington then, and then Stu and I had a long conversation. The sum total of it was, by the time I got back to Memphis, I was converted from being a coop appointment to a regular appointment career status as a GS-5, as opposed to the normal GS-7. I used to kid Bill that at that time he was the longest co-op that had ever been, and I was the shortest co-op. I was converted in about 5 months. So I returned to Memphis. By the second year on the job, I was, as a GS-7, the federal city rep in Memphis for the VD program. I recruited all over west Tennessee and eastern Arkansas. I gave the people we brought into Memphis a rapid training program on how to draw blood. Then they went to the interviewing school in Atlanta, and then they were transferred throughout the United States. We hired some 50 people that second year in Memphis. Harden: How did you decide who was going to work out and who wasn't? Did you talk to each person? Griggs: I interviewed them all. I was the major interviewer at that point. There was not a central interviewing team; it developed later within VD for the large-scale interviewing. But we visited colleges, had an ad in the paper, and interviewed people. We tried to pick people who were resourceful, self-starting, understood kind of what they were getting into. Then in the summer of the second year, because the pilot project had been very successful on the border, I went back to El Paso, which was the headquarters of the program. Five reception centers along the border, El Centro, AA, Nogales, AZ, El Paso, TX, Eagle Pass and Hidalgo, TX processed the Braceros who were initially screened at three centers in Mexico. We had 1 assignee in southern California, 1 assignee in Hidalgo, Texas, and me. I covered the Nogales, Arizona, and the El Paso station out of El Paso. That was my first real exposure to international work. We visited down in Mexico at the reception centers. Mexico had 3 such places, where the overall health of the workers was checked before they came to the border. Harden: And this experience is what made you the logical person, I suppose, to be coordinator for the International Symposium on Syphilis and Treponematoses in 1960-1961. Griggs: Right. Harden: This symposium was bringing together people from all over the world, then, or the Western Hemisphere? Griggs: It was worldwide. There were about 1,500 people at the symposium, held in Washington, D.C., at the Sheraton Park, from some 65 or 70 countries. It was a large meeting, probably a first-class meeting, with translation in French and Spanish. There were lots of papers, a lot of coordination in terms of getting the people together, letters out for the invited speakers, establishing everything that goes along with a meeting of that size. I had left El Paso and gone to Houston as the city rep. Then I went from Houston to Atlanta, when I was interviewed for this job as the coordinator of the symposium. I was offered the opportunity to live in Washington and commute to Atlanta. The VD program had moved from Washington to Atlanta in '57. Or I could live in Atlanta and spend a lot of time commuting to Washington and New York. The other sponsor of the program was the American Social Health Association in New York City. And with Atlanta being a much better place to live than Washington, that wasn't much of a problem. That was a supposedly temporary assignment for 22 months to hold that symposium. At the end of that particular assignment, I went back into the VD program at headquarters as the Assistant Chief of Operations and Development. I had responsibility for the grant program, in terms of working with the states and the major cities in submitting and approving VD control grants. By now it's late '64. I got a call from Bill Watson 1 day, and he said, "There's going to be a program for smallpox and measles control, with USAID [US Agency for International Development] sponsorship and funding, that D.A. Henderson [Donald A. Henderson] is starting to get together, or and I'd like for you to go over and talk to D.A. about being the Program Management Officer and deputy of that program." So I went over and talked to D.A. Harden: And I understand that you had to do some selling about how to structure the personnel for this program. Griggs: D.A. had come out of the Epi program, and while he had had some exposure to Public Health Advisors, he had not really worked very closely with them at that time. I had to sell the idea of a joint effort with an M.D. epidemiologist and an Operations Officer. It clearly was going to be a program of operations, not just one of technical expertise. Harden: This is very important. Would you talk a little more and define what a Public Health Advisor did, how he was trained, and then explain if Operations Officers did the same thing or were slightly different? Griggs: The title "Operations Officer" was created for Africa, but they would actually have been civil service Public Health Advisors in the United States. The Operations Officer title was more descriptive for the African people than the title "Public Health Advisor" because we wanted it clearly understood that these guys were operationally involved. Just like in the Public Health Advisors in the United States, they worked with local health or state health departments or regional offices. But they pretty much had the understanding and expectation that they were responsible for getting the job done. Generally speaking, it was a situation in which, not that we can't do it, but how can we do it? In other words, if it needs something else, what do you need to get it done? Public health advisors started out just interviewing and running down contacts, and then moved up to supervisory positions, grant writing. In some instances, they were literally functioning as VD control officers. So it was a multitask, multifaceted background and job. I might add that growing up on a farm didn't hurt any, either, because it was all of the kinds of things that you have to do in getting jobs done. And if I may digress for one second, we had a problem out in El Paso, in terms of who was running the public health aspects of the bracero program. When we got there with 4 people, the quarantine people asked where the other 20 people were. But we couldn't slow down. We had to run these people through at that speed. So we had to work out a system that would let us, with 4 federal employees and a couple of local hires, handle that-drawing bloods and processing them; getting the results shipped to Austin and back again. So there was a lot of that kind of thing that came along. So I was used to multitasking and making do with what we had. Harden: So after you convinced Dr. Henderson to have Operations Officers in the smallpox program, what was the next step? Did you have to go out and hire people? How? Griggs: When I started with D.A., probably in November, there was an expectation that there was going to be a program, but there was a daunting list of things that had to be done before July 1966. When we started, no project agreements had been signed with any country in Africa, and there was no project proposal. We had to recruit personnel. We had to negotiate a PASA (Participating Agency Service Agreement), which would provide the funding for the program. We had to negotiate project agreements with Country- Specific Plans for each country in Africa. This would require an agreement between the US Government and each of the Ministers of Health of those countries to do the program. We had to develop a training program for the new employees to begin in July; it had to include language training as well as epidemiology and technical matters. We had to develop needs and specifications for all materials that would include quantity and quality and develop the Requests for Proposals (bids) for the equipment. We had to develop a comprehensive Manual of Operations, both technical and operational (which WHO latter took and issued it as though they had written it!). We had to develop the knowledge required to write individual country agreements that would be negotiated and signed by the host countries. All of this went on simultaneously. And we did it! I think D.A. came around relatively quickly to understanding the need for the Operations Officers. He and Henry Gelfand, who was one of the other physicians in the office then, did a fair amount of interviewing physicians. Not only were we looking within the current EIS class, since we had the opportunity to get the young docs who came to CDC as an alternative to serving their draft time, but we were also looking outside of the Commission Corps. I might add that we got some very outstanding physicians that way. Don Hopkins [Donald R. Hopkins] was an individual who was hired as a physician from outside of the EIS, a direct hire. We also hired several more experienced physicians who went overseas. In most countries, the model was to have a physician epidemiologist and an Operations Officer. In a few of the smaller countries, the physician epidemiologist served 2 countries with an Operations Officer in each country. In Nigeria, because of its size and complexity, in addition to the headquarters office in Lagos we had multiple docs and OOs. Harden: My understanding is that there were an awful lot of details regarding the equipment that had to be used in the project. You had to deal with trucks, with doing procurements for trucks that were U.S.-made, getting them rigged up to have refrigerators for measles vaccine. Can you tell me about what all you had to do at this time from that standpoint? Griggs: Well, we had the benefit of a little bit of history of this. To backtrack 1 second . . .When measles vaccine was first in the process of development at NIH [National Institutes of Health], the Minister of Health from Upper Volta came over on a leadership grant visit. He was being shown the measles vaccine, and he said, "Measles is a major killer of children in my country, and I would like to offer my country as a place to field test the measles vaccine for you." So in '63 or thereabouts, the USAID signed a project agreement with Upper Volta to go out and do several hundred thousand measles immunizations. CDC was asked to provide an EIS Officer to work with Hank Meyer of NIH as an advisor in the field for this team. USAID provided some trucks and the Ped-O- Jets (foot-operated hydraulic instruments that give an injection of the vaccine) to use the vaccine with; Merck, which had the measles vaccine, provided the unlicensed vaccine. And the program went to Upper Volta. The first year, it was more successful than expected. I think they did about 700,000 vaccinations, and the next year the measles incidence in Upper Volta just dropped off to practically nothing. So the surrounding countries said that they would like to have a measles program, and USAID was negotiating to do that. They asked for 3 or 4 EIS Officers, and the program was expanded to 2 or 3 countries. The second year, they did not do the program in Upper Volta; they did the surrounding countries. The third year, Upper Volta got measles back-right back where it was to start with. So it was known early that in order to be successful in measles, it was going to require a fast-hitting, multiple repeat because the birth rate was so high that you built a new supply of susceptibles each year. So the reason the smallpox program actually came into existence was that USAID come back to CDC and said, "We would like to have a major measles program, and we need 20 EIS Officers to be assignees to work with these countries on doing this." And D.A. picked up on this and said, "Measles is going to be a never-ending problem." So D.A. proposed the business of adding smallpox eradication to this measles program for West and Central Africa. The idea of pushing for a global smallpox eradication program had come up in WHO [the World Health Organization]. And this part of the world was probably going to be the toughest to try to do it in. So it was proposed as a 19-country program, starting in Congo, and over to Chad, and Central African Republic, the whole West and Central Africa. That, USAID would consider doing. We were putting together this proposal as to what it was going to cost for such a program-this was the project agreement proposal that I was talking about earlier. For that proposal, based on what information was available from the old measles program, we had to determine what kinds of vehicles were going to be required for each country, what kinds of vaccine, how much refrigeration space, the whole bit. This was all calculated into this project agreement for each individual country. It totaled up to a $46 million, 5-year eradication program for smallpox and control of measles in the 19 West and Central African countries. Subsequently, the other, 20th country was added, which was Fernando Po, which became Equatorial Guinea So we did our best guess as to needs on the basis of the life expectancy of the trucks, in terms of replacement on a 2-year basis; the life expectancy of the Ped-O-Jets; etc. All of this was listed by country. We started with 16 countries the first year. The second year we added 3 countries, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. The third year, the 20th country was added. Harden: When you had to estimate the life expectancy and plan for the budget, were you correct? Did the items last that long, or longer, or not as long? Griggs: Well, we had some problems with vehicles that had not been expected. The Dodge truck was the vehicle that was chosen by bid. Bids were requested from Dodge, GMC, and Ford, and Dodge won the bid. And it was an eminently suitable vehicle. I was familiar with Dodge and was pleased that they won the bid. But we ran into the difficulties with the roads. This truck, being a long-bed crew-cab, had a lot of weight on the 2 axles, so a lot of axles were broken in Africa. And while we sent over with each truck each year a best guess as to what was going to be needed for repair, replacements to keep the vehicles running, it soon became apparent that we needed a system that would provide rapid turnaround in emergencies because if a vehicle was down, everything came to a stop. So we negotiated with an Atlanta Dodge dealer, a parts replacement general contractor, on a task order. We could just order what we needed, and it would be air- freighted to Africa. We would get a cable saying, "Gotta have this," and that day it was ordered and put on an air freight shipment. And it was usually in Africa in about a week, 10 days. Harden: And who actually did the replacement of the part? The Operations Officer? Griggs: Yes. But I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit. Going back to the spring, when we were writing these agreements, we actually had people start in late spring-Henry Gelfand, for example. And George Lythcott, who was a doctor working on a program in Ghana from NIH, was selected as the director for the regional office to be established in Lagos. Mike Lane [J. Michael Lane] and a couple other people were visiting the countries, negotiating project agreements, explaining the program, moving towards getting signatures. After the participating agency service agreement had been signed with USAID and it was a pretty sure bet that we were going forward with this, we started recruiting people and started security clearances on doctors and Operations Officers. They were to report to Atlanta the first of July to go through the EIS course, which was normal training for that period. And then these recruits were to stay on for an additional training course in smallpox activities, in which there was a mechanic's course. It was lengthier for the Operations Officers, with a shorter version for the Medical Officers, to learn all about these Dodge vehicles and how to repair them. Now, keep in mind that the repair of the trucks was the responsibility of the host country. I mean, their facilities, their mechanics, supposedly. And they had had some exposure to Dodges, but not a lot. But the Dodge turned out to be a very good vehicle. I was last in Africa shortly after retirement in 1989, in Togo, and I saw 2 of the Dodge trucks that had been there. The last one was probably sent to Africa in '70 or '71. And in '89, 2 of them that I saw out in the field were still running. Harden: Let's talk about going to Africa. Being the headquarters operation, you had to help all these people get settled in all these different countries. How did that work? Griggs: After the decision was made to have a regional office in Lagos, we were going to send 9 people there. We had a young, not brand- new EIS officer who was going to be the epidemiologist. George Lythcott was going to be the director. Jim Hicks [James W. Hicks], a senior Public Health Advisor, was going over as the administrative officer. Bill Despres [William Despres] was the assistant administrative officer. We also had a Muriel Roy, a US secretary, Gordon Robbins, as a health educator and Nat Rothstein [Nathaniel Rothstein] as a virologist. We were going to be there primarily to work with the vaccine production facility, to develop a creditable one there in Lagos to make smallpox vaccine. We also had a statistician, Davis [Hillard Davis] and Bill Shoemaker as an equipment specialist. So 9 people were sent there. And they were to provide a nucleus of expertise. They could rapidly get from Lagos to the surrounding countries in those various areas statistics, senior epidemiologic skills, or an administrative function, or whatnot, rather than trying to have all that kind of expertise in each country or from CDC. I first went to Africa in the summer of '66, with responsibility for working with the Department of State, embassy, and USAID, in terms of lining up office and housing space for the regional office people. We located offices, prevailed upon USAID to sign the contracts for the offices and houses. An activity out of Washington, called the regional office, had the responsibility for several of the smaller countries. So really all of the administrative sorts of activities were handled by the embassy, on agreement between USAID and the embassy and those countries. Providing office space was the responsibility of the host country, and they actually had an office in the Ministry of Health, or in an appropriate health building with the Ministry of Health. And the housing was provided by the US Embassy on a contract basis. Harden: And that worked out okay? Griggs: Worked out fine. Harden: In 1966, D.A. Henderson moved to Geneva, with WHO, and Don Millar [J. Donald Millar] came back from London to take over, is that correct?. Griggs: Don had been at the London School of Tropical Medicine, getting a degree, and he came home in the summer of '66. Don was missing during most of the preparation for the smallpox program. He got back just as we were getting folks to start. Harden: And I have a quote here that you said to him, "Welcome to the NFL." You want to explain that, and talk about how it was to shift from 1 leader to the other leader? Griggs: Well, Don and D.A. had a considerably different management philosophy, I guess you would say. I didn't know Don. I may have met him, but I had not remembered meeting Don until he showed up at the office coming back from England. We hit it off quite well. Don was completely unexposed to the operations office or the Public Health Advisors, but he quickly saw their value and was a champion of the Public Health Advisor throughout the remainder of his career, even after he became Director of NIOSH. So after Don came in, the program was moving right along, in terms of the training activities; project agreement signings were slow. We had planned on sending the first people to Africa in September to get things kind of on the road at the end of the rainy season and be ready to start at the beginning of the dry season. The last pro-ag [USAID term for a project agreement] was signed, I think, in March of '67. There were considerable delays in getting all of these, and there was some very fancy footwork involved in getting pro-ags signed. It's too bad that George Lythcott's not here. George was a master at getting things done in Africa. I won't say how, but he wound up getting an appointment with the head of the government of Nigeria at the time after the coup. And he got a commitment that the pro-ag would be signed, and it was signed. That was the big one, with the regional office going into Nigeria and the 3 or 4 regional assignments within Nigeria. And because of its size and complexity, northern Nigeria had a Medical Officer and 2 Operations Officers. It had a male and a female Operations Officer, the only female Operations Officer we had, because of the expected difficulty of working with purdah, in terms of getting the women vaccinated. And it worked out quite well. Harden: What was her name? Griggs: Vicky Jones [Clara Jones]. Harden: Were there any unusual occurrences that you can think of that you can tell me about? Griggs: There were so many things that were happening. We had some problems with 1 individual, I recall, who had difficulty with a security clearance. He never got it cleared, so he was very unhappy. The people who were sitting in Atlanta with families, living in temporary quarters, and being delayed about going overseas, were considerably unhappy. Harden: And this was all coming back to your desk? Griggs: Mine and Don's. For the docs, it would go to Don, and Don would come to me. If it was the Operations Officer, he'd come to me, and then we'd try to get it resolved. Don and I went to Nigeria, for a meeting-it was after the program had started. The folks who were in Africa came to it, and they were less than happy campers, I guess is a good way to describe it. For a variety of reasons. During the training session, because of the cross-cultural problems they were going to be facing, we tried to give some insight into the things, the do's and don'ts, or at least, "Think twice before you do it" type things. And I remember very vividly, one of the wives who had been aghast at the thought of having a cook, a nanny for the kids, a gardener, and a night- watch person, and maybe a small boy for the kitchen, depending on how many kids they had. This was the typical number of servants a family would have. She didn't want that. But when she got to Africa, she was very unhappy because she was in an apartment. (We lived by the ground rules that the American embassy had, that folks with no children and single people were usually put in flats and apartments. If possible, families with children were given a house with a yard.) So when Don and I got to Yaounde, this woman was very unhappy because she was in an apartment when other folks had houses. So the uptightness about the ugly American with hiring the people and going to the market and sending the local hire to the market to buy food and whatnot, and not shopping for themselves, soon became a thing of the past. People realized that they just couldn't cope with that kind of activity. Harden: Very interesting. What was the toughest problem that you recall in this whole endeavor? Griggs: Oh. I hadn't even thought about that. I guess what caused the most consternation were the delays in getting project agreements and getting people out there, ready to go. Harden: So the beginning was [the hardest?] Once it was going, it was [ok]? Griggs: As you can imagine, people have a tendency, if a program says they're going to do 300,000 vaccinations, to want 400,000 doses of vaccine because they're going to have some loss at the end of the day. (Vaccine that is opened is discarded at the end of the day.) So they ordered more vaccine than they needed. Or some didn't order enough vaccine. It was a problem trying to second- guess people in the field, or respond back and forth to people in the field about what the realities of the program are. For example, you've got to have the vaccine, you have to discard it if it's at the end of the day, but if there are only 2 people left and you're going to be there in the morning, you don't necessarily open a large vial of vaccine to throw away-that type deal. And the business of getting the parts. Having been in the field myself, I know it's never fast enough. "How come I didn't get it yesterday?" is the attitude. So there was a certain amount of confusion and consternation constantly. But the program had a budgeted cost of $46 million. It was completed at a cost of just over US $30 million-largely through some good work on the contract officer's part, being innovative and looking at alternative sources for things. So it was $16 million under cost, and it was completed in West and Central Africa a year ahead of schedule in terms of smallpox eradication. Harden: That is an amazing story. Tell me about the bureaucratic relations between headquarters in Atlanta and the regional office in Nigeria, in Lagos. Griggs: Sore point. The regional office was designed to start with as a resource of experts to be available for the countries. I wasn't involved in recruiting George Latchet, so I don't know what was said to him. George felt that the regional office was the director and that Atlanta was to provide support to the staff in the Regional Office. This misunderstanding was resolved, I think amicably, and George stayed through to the end of the program, and I think he was satisfied. He would have much preferred to have been running the program, but I don't know how to say much more about it than that. Copies of memos and reports went to the regional office so that they were aware of what was going on, but things did not go through the regional office to be signed off on. Dave [David Sencer] just walked in, and I 'm sure that he may have a different story about this regional office conflict, but it was resolved. People were not ecstatic over the way it resolved, but the program operated. Harden: If you were going to undertake the program again, would you do anything differently? Griggs: Knowing what I know right now, I might do something differently. Not a lot. This doesn't sound right coming from me, but we didn't make a lot of mistakes in the smallpox program. Things were thought out, were worked out. We had a couple of people who I might not have recruited, but we didn't bring anybody home for improper action, or for not doing their job. And to have had 46 people in the field at 1 time-and overall, I've not even looked at the number, but probably with replacements, probably 60 or 70-people overseas-and not to have had somebody that didn't work out? We had a medical evac [evacuation] or 2, now. But I 'm talking about bringing somebody home for either being unable to carry out their work or the host country's saying, "Get this guy out of here"-that just didn't happen. Harden: That's also very impressive, is it not? Did you ever have any doubts that the program was going to be a success? Griggs : No, none, after it got off the ground, in terms of smallpox eradication. Success in terms of measles control? An awful lot of people thought it couldn't be done. It was proven that it could be done with the right kind of input. Bob Helmholtz [Robert C. Helmholtz] ran the program in Gambia out of Senegal, and Tom Leonard [Thomas A. Leonard] doubled with Bob in Senegal for a short period of time. Tom was in Mauritania, when the '68 conflict occurred there, and the US Government left. Tom went and finished his tour in Senegal, but The Gambia had a good person who was in charge of the program, had a Minister of Health who was very much in favor of this. It was a small enough country, and while it was had poor roads, it had a river that ran through the middle of it, and you could get up and down the river. And The Gambia interrupted measles transmission and kept the country measles free for a couple of years. So it could be done. But it required an awful lot of effort, and I don't think Africa was ready for that effort. But smallpox was a success. Harden: How did you all, in headquarters, deal with the feedback you were getting, in terms of your conversations? The feedback from the people on the ground, and what you then said back to them? Griggs: There was a weekly newsletter that went out to all the field staff, which was kind of folksy. It originated in Atlanta. Don dictated material for it, and I added to it. It covered what was going on, what the problems were, what some solutions to problems were. There were lots of phone conversations. In those days, you connected to French West Africa through Paris, and English West Africa through London, with a radio call from there on down. So you started out with a voice that they could hear at least 2 floors above you, to build up impetus on the radio, and after a long conversation you almost lost your voice sometimes. Harden: What do you think that the Africans learned about CDC and about America from this program? Griggs: Some of them already had exposure to CDC. They had been CDC EIS officers in with the measles program a little bit earlier. The Operations Officers were told that their responsibility was to get the job done, but not to do it. If you do it, if you're out on vacation or out sick, things are going to go to hell in a hand basket quickly. So while it's much more difficult to train your counterpart to do the work, it's worth the effort if you want something left when you are not there. And you could very quickly see the difference when this philosophy was accepted and followed through on, as opposed to when work was done directly by the Operations Officer. Harden: So that was a legacy, then, that was left from the program? Griggs: That was a legacy that was left. To each of the training programs each year, we brought a cadre of docs and nurses. Now, Africa had a few docs, but most of the actual field activities of the program were carried out by nurses or kind of an African Operations Officer, if you want to call them that. A group of those came to Atlanta each summer-probably at least 100 people over the 5 years. The last year of the smallpox program in Africa, when the CDC people were brought home, was '71. USAID wanted to follow up with a program for childhood immunizable diseases. Such a program subsequently came to CDC, through a participating agency service agreement. And the activities, the countries that were involved in this were virtually the same as those involved in the smallpox program, with some expansion into eastern and southern Africa. So, all in all, I would think that from the standpoint of foreign relations-forget about the health aspects of it-the money spent on the smallpox program was probably better or equal to anything that was spent otherwise. In the 20 countries, there were a lot of coups and counter-coups, changes of government, and a civil war in Nigeria right in the middle of starting the program. And no one was evacuated except the team that was in eastern Nigeria. But in terms of a coup and a change of government, the smallpox and measles program proceeded as if nothing had happened. Harden: What impact did the program have on your career? Griggs: Hard to say. I guess it was probably good. Dave Sencer came in as the Director of CDC during the program, and I could have said this better if he wasn't in here, but I'm going to say it anyway. The smallpox program was accused of being Dave Sencer's pets, the fair-haired boys, but I might add that when Don and I, or subsequently after Don, when Bill Foege [William Foege] and I went to Dave and laid out what we needed, Dave bent over backwards and gave us what we needed, to the extent possible, and it was sufficient. Harden: Did this program have any impact on your family? Now, you were here in Atlanta primarily; you visited Africa but you weren't living there. But how did your family think about it? Griggs: I had a good wife, who understood being gone 3 weeks at a time. George Lythcott tried his damnedest to recruit me to go to Africa, to the regional office. And I turned him down. And obviously he had talked to D.A., and maybe to Dave, and I think they turned him down. Other than being away from home a short period of time, while I was in VD, I was home on weekends. But I traveled more days when I was working the 50 states than I did when I was working Africa. Harden: Did any of your children go into health-related work? Griggs: No. Harden: Not a one? Griggs: Not a one. As a matter of fact, my son may have had a negative impact from this. He was, I think, pleased with the work that I was doing, but he was adamant that he did not want to work for the government. I don't know who brainwashed him. Harden: Very interesting. Is there anything else you can think of about the program that we should capture in this interview, before we stop? Griggs: Well, I'm sure that Don Millar and others will say it better than I would, but the things that were really learned about doing immunization work from the smallpox program, in this country as well as other countries, have made a big impact on US activities, as well as on international activities in other countries. Obviously, D.A. was head of the smallpox program in Geneva. West and Central Africa cleared up right quickly. It was obvious that some problems were occurring in India, Bangladesh, and other places. CDC people from the West Africa program went overseas into many of those countries, to either get them kick- started or to stay there and wind up. In Bangladesh, India, Andy Agle was in Afghanistan, so it was a maturing of CDC's international venture, I think. While CDC is a domestic organization, when I left CDC we had people assigned in probably 25 or 30 countries around the world, through WHO or through other avenues-the World Bank, UNICEF, etc. And this has contributed, in my estimation immeasurably, to other health activities. I think the Gates Foundation's work in international health goes back to the smallpox program. Bill Foege was a missionary in eastern Nigeria, and I guess was happy when we recruited him to be a contract doc for eastern Nigeria for us. And when he was evacuated, we brought him back here, and he became one of the lead people in smallpox. When Don left, Bill of course became the director. Went back to India for the wipe- up on that. I'm sure, no question in my mind, that the Bill Gates Foundation would not be doing what it's doing, if it were not for Bill Foege. Harden: Thank you so much for speaking with me. ### </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u3ZkP0e4TzI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Type The nature or genre of the resource interviews motion pictures moving image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006-07-07 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/15n65 emory:15n65 Subject The topic of the resource CDC Smallpox Eradication USAID WHO Operations Officer Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 13350960000 bytes video/x-dv Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Harden, Victoria (Interviewer) Griggs, Bill (Interviewee); CDC Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Centers for Disease Control Title A name given to the resource GRIGGS, BILL Description An account of the resource Bill Griggs started his career as a Public Health Advisor in the Venereal Disease Program of CDC. He became known as a person to turn to in order to get something done. When the Smallpox Eradication effort began he was assigned to recruit people to act as Operations Officers, a concept that was new to international health programs. Bill was Assistant Director of CDC for International Health at the time of his retirement. Language A language of the resource English https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/189c6990eb95656e8ffa65d0f8bb8ee1.jpg fc484870df069fb62562aa7cae6e7ba4 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/03c080dab62178c653cac747f195f221.pdf 8b86e28aa2301d6f1ecb3e5fcd68ad68 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound. <pre><strong> Interview Transcript </strong> Interview Dr. Mary Guinan | with Interviewer Melissa McSwigan Transcribed: January 28 2009 | Duration 0:54:36 Melissa McSwigan: This is an interview with Mary Guinan on July10, 2008 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, about her involvement with the Smallpox Eradication Program. The interview is being conducted as part of our reunion, marking the 40th anniversary of the program in Asia and East Africa. The interviewer is Melissa McSwigan. Now, with this interview, we are hoping to capture for future generations the memories of participants and their families involved in eradicating smallpox from Asia and East Africa. This is an incredibly important and historic achievement and we want to hear about your experience. I have some questions to guide you, but please, feel free to recount any special stories or anecdotes that you remember about events or people. So you sign the legal agreement which says that you were donating the oral history to the U.S. Federal Government and it will be in the public domain. You will have a chance to edit the transcribed interview and add or delete information as you see fit before it is made public. So at this point, I'm going to ask you to state your full name and that you know the interview is being recorded. Mary Guinan: I'm Mary Guinan and I know this interview is being recorded. Melissa McSwigan: Okay perfect. Could you maybe start out by talking about how your education and upbringing led you into working in Public Health? Mary Guinan: Well-I'm not sure how my education and upbringing brought me into Public Health, but I'll tell you how I decided that I wanted to be part of the Smallpox Eradication Program. I was born in New York City, a child of immigrants. My parents were immigrants from Ireland. They were farmers. They had maybe three years of education, 3rd Grade education level and they came to follow the American dream. There were lots of political persecutions in Ireland and they were - and it wasn't a good time. So they met on a ship coming here. Neither of them knew anyone here in America and they established a presence in New York. My dad worked with the Subway, the New York City Subway System. My mom had a job as a dressmaker I think first, and then she was working in a house as an Assistant to the Chef, in a house in New York. Many Irish women came to America worked as servants or assistants with large wealthy families and that's what my mother did; and they eventually got married years later - five years later. The Irish were very slow at this. I grew up in New York City and they believed in education. They believed that that was the way to move ahead and they loved this country because of its freedom and lack of persecution for your political views and they were very, very - they were very loyal Americans and felt that this was really an important place to be and that we should be grateful-I was the middle of five children- we should be grateful for being born in this country and for exactly what we had available to us. So when I was a young teenager my dad died very suddenly and my mother had no means of support and we all got jobs to work our way through school; and I worked my way through school and graduated from high school. I worked my way through college. I wanted to be a physician, but women weren't being admitted to medical school then; and also, one of the criteria for medical school was that you had to have money to pay for it; and there weren't scholarships available or other things available to students like me who really didn't have the means to do that. So I decided then that I would pursue other things. I majored in Chemistry in college and when I graduated, I couldn't get a job because they didn't hire woman Chemists. So I was interested in - I got a job in a Chewing Gum Factory... Melissa McSwigan: Really! Mary Guinan: ...making chewing gum. It was the American Chicle Company and they made Chiclets and all sorts of chewing gum. Black Jack chewing gum was one of them and I was the Flavor Chemist. I was hired as a Flavor Chemist so part of my job was making new flavors, developing new flavors of chewing gum. It was not terribly rewarding kind of existence, but there wasn't really much available for women then and I try to look for fellowships and I applied to many schools, to graduate school, and I was rejected mostly because I was a woman; and if I was accepted, I couldn't get a fellowship program because they didn't give them to women at that time. But at the time the Space Program was in full bloom and with Sputnik, President Kennedy had said we wanted to be on the moon; that we were going to the moon; and there were lots of became-available fellowships for scientists. They wanted scientists to be in the Space Program and I've decided that I wanted to be an astronaut. So I found out that the University of Texas was where the Space Program was, near NASA in Texas, Clear Lake City, but the University of Texas Medical Branch in Texas had a program for scientist in Aerospace Medicine and that the Director of the Medical Program, Chuck Berry - Dr. Chuck Berry, had an appointment at the University of Texas there. So I applied there to get my PhD in Physiology and Space Medicine and I wanted to be an astronaut. Of course I didn't tell anybody then that I wanted to be an astronaut because women didn't do those sorts of things. So I went to Texas and people in New York said: You won't last there-about six months. You know you're a New York person born and brought up in New York. But I did, I lasted four years and I went to NASA. I applied - all of my class in physiology and space medicine there at the University took a test for the Astronaut Program and I was the only woman who took it and I was the only one who passed the test. The reason I passed the test was I had 20/20 vision; and all the other people wore glasses. I mean that - and you also had to fit into the capsule. It was like the old days of being a flight attendant, you had to be a certain height and weight and not wear glasses. But I knew that it was unlikely that I was going to be an astronaut, that there was a great deal of competition for it. So I finished my - but I got to see all the astronauts, I took classes at NASA. The astronauts, you know like John Glenn and Neil Armstrong gave classes and talked about their experiences in space. It was really exciting; I was really excited as a Scientist; and I did a post doctoral fellowship; I got a Post Doctoral Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland; and it was during the Vietnam War and I actually had gotten a place that was for a man who had been drafted. So I filled in and I knew that I wouldn't really be there very long because they saved the places for men who had been drafted and had gone to war; and it was very difficult for me to get a job at NIH because I didn't have an MD degree, and my mentor there at NIH said to me, "It would be so easy to get you a job if you had an MD." You know, this is always the case, you know, if you just did this, you know, we could get you a job. So I applied to two medical schools. Since I was living in Maryland, I applied to the University of Maryland to Johns Hopkins; and I got rejected from the University of Maryland and accepted at Johns Hopkins which tells you something about the crazy system we have about being accepted into medical school. I was very grateful because I was sort of an alternative student. I didn't go from college to medical school. I had done this detour and had been in Texas which most people think: What in God's name did you go to Texas for? In Texas, people said, "What is this New York girl doing in Texas?" So I think one of the presumption was I try and find a rich husband, you know, a Texas oil man or something and that was the assumption-there weren't very many women doing graduate work. So I went to medical school and I graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1972 and during that time period, I was continuing my career, I had done my PhD, my doctorate in physiology in the area of blood coagulation and I was wanting to continue my career and be a hematologist, oncologist, and go in academic medicine. That's what I thought I would want to do. Never thought about public health, didn't really know about public health. I went to medical school at Johns Hopkins where one of the premiere Public Health Schools in the nation is, and took courses but really had no interest in public health at that time. But I was interested in tropical medicine and I did a tropical medicine fellowship in Mexico during my senior year at Hopkins and was interested in tropical medicine. Then, as I was graduating, this was the end of the 60's and beginning of the 70's and what happened during my last year of medical school really changed my life, in that what happened was Kent State happened. People were killed for demonstrating. This is a free country, our Government. The United States Government, which I was very proud of being an American and was very, very upset about what happened in the anti-war demonstrations that went on; and then these students in Kent State were killed, unarmed students, by the National Guards that had been even called out. People killed and I thought: What has happed to this country that I live in? How can this be-that we're living in this country where they're killing unarmed demonstrators? Our whole history of our country was revolution and fighting for freedom and doing what we thought was right. So what happened was I decided I wasn't sure what I was going to do and so in my senior year I read in this magazine, sort of like a magazine at Hopkins about the Smallpox Eradication Program. That there was this idea to eradicate smallpox in the world and I thought, "Isn't that wonderful? What a great idea that we could eliminate a scourge. It would be the first time in history that by the design of man or woman, there would be a human disease eliminated from the world and smallpox, a very frightening disease." But you know, I just thought that, "Isn't that a wonderful idea?" I didn't really think about it much. Then after that Kent State and I started doing my internship in Internal Medicine with the idea that I would go on to be a hematologist and do a fellowship in hematology, oncology; and as I was going, during my senior of medical school, I was on the clinical service with someone who was going to be an EIS Officer at the CDC. I had no idea what an EIS Officer was and he told me that it was the Epidemic Intelligence Service at CDC. I said, "What's that?" He said it was a two-year program and you go there and you learn how to be an epidemiologist, which I really didn't have any interest in. Then I saw this other article in the Hopkins Journal Magazine. You know, they have an internal magazine, about this Smallpox Eradication Program worldwide, and how our Government was participating in it, our Government. So I thought, "Wouldn't that be wonderful to be part of a Government Program that was really doing something wonderful?" Then I found out that the people who were going were being assigned from CDC, so you had to come to CDC and somehow get a job at CDC and then you could be assigned to the Smallpox Eradication Program. So I talked to my friend at Hopkins about this program and he said, "Yes, it's EIS Officers who were going over there on the Smallpox Eradication Program." So I applied to the EIS Program and in 1973 I guess, I was accepted; and I came to interview and I was the only woman physician in my class that was accepted, and during that time, when you are hired at CDC you are hired in the commission core of the public health service which was an alternative to military service and the draft was still ongoing. So people would say, "We're not accepting women here because if we do, another guy has to go to Vietnam. So we're not accepting women." During the interview I was told this when I came to CDC for the interview. So I wasn't sure that I would be accepted, but I was. I don't know why, but I was. I was accepted into the program and so I came as an EIS Officer. I was assigned to hospital infections that's in bacterial diseases then and I would go - we used to have a Tuesday morning seminar in Auditorium-B every week for all the EIS Officers and we'd attend this meeting and there'd be announcements at the beginning and every time somebody from the smallpox program would go up and say, "We are looking for volunteers for the Smallpox Eradication Program." You know it was a three or four-month assignment in India now was the part; and I applied to go and they told me, they were not taking women. Now, Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India so it's like to say, "Well, how is it possible?" That was the first round and then each week, you know, they'd have somebody and finally, Phil Brachman was head of the EIS Program and I said, "You know, I keep volunteering and I keep getting turned down, but I don't know why. Can you tell me what the criteria are?" So I think they thought I might make a fuss because I actually had made a little bit of a fuss although I didn't think it was a big deal, but everybody else thought it was a big deal. When I applied to the EIS, I was accepted, but we had to get three references from physicians who knew us, and they sent me the reference sheets that had to be completed and it was: "Will you please rate this candidate on his background on his - whatever he does and is he a leader? Is he going to..." You know, there wasn't a parenthesis with "she" and so I sent back the forms, I said, "I'm sorry. I'm a woman. Do you have forms for women?" and apparently that caused some issues here at CDC before I arrived, so they figured, "Oh, oh-this is trouble coming." They wrote back and said, "We do not discriminate, but we don't have any female forms." So, they crossed out the "he" and put "her" and "she" in the appropriate spots. So when I came, I think that there was an idea that maybe - feminism was just sort of coming into existence. It really didn't exist until later; it was funny. So there was this worry I think so finally, they said, "You're going. You're going to India." So I went in December of '74 through early May of '75. Melissa McSwigan: Okay. So that was about six months that you were in India? Mary Guinan: Probably less-somewhere in there. Melissa McSwigan: And what was your exact role while you were in India? Mary Guinan: What our roles were was that we would be assigned to a district, some district area that - and you did surveillance for smallpox, looked for smallpox cases and then if you found one, you quarantine the case and then surrounded it with a ring of immunity in a five or 10-mile radius around because smallpox spread locally; and this have been demonstrated in India, actually Bill Foege who really was a person who worked this out and really is probably one of the people responsible for the eradication of smallpox. Because he was in Africa and he probably told the story and you've heard it, but they would have a shortage of vaccine and they tried to figure out how to use it appropriately and they theorized that smallpox spread locally. So what you need to do is to surround the populate of the infected person with a ring of immunity and then it won't spread because it only spreads from person to person. There's no environmental reservoir for smallpox. Humans were the only source of smallpox; so you would find that - that was funny. Anyway that's what we had to do and we would be assigned. When I arrived at my destination, we first went to Geneva. On our first assignment, we'd go to Geneva and we met all the people who were being assigned; and I went with Walter Einstein from CDC who you probably will be interviewing too. He and I were both from New York City and we were assigned together to Uttar Pradesh; and then we were assigned to go to Uttar Pradesh. So we were in Geneva and then we were sent to Uttar Pradesh and there were still smallpox in Uttar Pradesh. There were two provinces in India, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar that still had smallpox. So it was like a competition between Bihar and Uttar Pradesh; who would come first down to smallpox zero? What we'd do is, we would go out into the field; we would go and do surveillance. You were assigned a driver and a paramedical assistant and then you were given all these traveler's checks like in Rupees because you had to hire people, and you had to pay them. Then I would go to the bank and cash these checks so I'd have lots of money to pay people to immunize. You had to get vaccinators. You had to get people to work for you. I didn't realize what the whole system was in India, but since my driver and paramedical assistant had been working, and my paramedical assistant was Shaffy[0:22:56] Mohamed, he was a Muslim, and my driver was a Hindu, and they spoke different languages actually. Shaffy spoke English perfectly, but his native language is Urdu not Hindi, so that we had this three way thing going on trying to communicate with Urdu, Hindi and English. I didn't speak any of either, but I learned to read the Hindi symbols so I could read the road signs and they were very small - rarely was there a road sign, but if there were, the driver couldn't read, so I would phonetically sound the symbols so I could tell which way the direction was pointing. I would say, "Kahnpour[inaudible 23:44]; that way, okay this is where we want to go." The paramedical assistant acted as your interpreter, your cook. To find a place to stay, we were issued Tenson[0:24:10] sleeping bags and these mattresses. You know, thinking about India, I thought it would be very hot and didn't bring any warm clothes, but Uttar Pradesh is up North near Nepal and it got very cold. It was three degrees (3º) centigrade when I arrived at the Delhi airport and it was cold. So I had made a quilt, so I would wrap it around me because I didn't have any warm clothes. We would go out and we would offer a reward; we'd go like to a village and the paramedical assistant would get up and say to the villagers, they had never seen a foreigner before so I was a great source of interest to people like: look at me, this is incredible.. This is an area of Uttar Pradesh which was 99% illiterate. They had never seen a foreigner before nor heard of America; and very often if we went to a Muslim village the women wanted me to come into their house because they didn't come out; they lived in - it was a part of their practice. So they always wanted me to come in to their house, their little mud hut, but they wouldn't allow my paramedical assistant in because he was a man, so I would go in there and we would do sign language. They couldn't understand; you know: Where were my babies? What was I doing there? I soon found out everybody - most of the women were pregnant, they had babies every year and while I was there, there were several babies that were named America because they heard this word America. They had no idea, they didn't have a concept of another language or another place; and if they asked my paramedical assistant where I was from, he'd say, "Oh, she's from the capital, Lucknow" Because they had no concept of another country and languages but they couldn't understand why I couldn't understand them. So it was that interesting. We would go to the village and we had these picture postcards that showed cases of smallpox and we would say, "Ten Rupees to anyone who can show me a case of smallpox" and it was increasingly - 10 Rupees was a lot of money then for the average person. So if there was smallpox in the village they would bring you to the person. Very often it was chickenpox, not smallpox; or something else. It wasn't smallpox; and you were supposed to be the expert, not having ever seen a case of smallpox, it was like strange to think that you were going to be the expert and tell whether this was smallpox or chickenpox. Of course we were taught at all of these training sessions how to do it. So we heard about a report of smallpox in a village that was supposed to be free of smallpox. So I was sent there out of my district, my district was Kanpur, but this was outside of my district, a place called Rampur Madras. So I went there and I looked at the case and it sure looked like smallpox to me; and at that time we took a culture of the lesions and put them in a little vial and a mailing case. Then I mailed it off to Delhi and they would either confirm, because they wanted to culture every case to see if it was really a case; but it would take weeks and weeks before the results came back. I declared it as smallpox and so we started our immunization. There were vaccinators who actually worked in all the villages. There's this infrastructure in India where they have these people who are vaccinators; and they could be hired. So my paramedical assistant would just let out the word and people would come and want to work for you because we paid very well. So what we would do, we would pay the people's family to be guards at the door. This is a mud hut in these villages and then we would pay a family member to be the guard at the door and the only people - they'd have to vaccinate them. Anybody who went in or out of the house had to be vaccinated. Melissa McSwigan: So this is the door of the house where the smallpox patient was? Mary Guinan: Yes, the smallpox case. So here's the case: this was a young man and nobody knew where he'd gotten smallpox from and he was a Brahman. The Caste System was a part of what was happening in India at the time although it was banned, it was outlawed, it was pretty much the practice. Everybody recognized - when you went into a village the first thing people asked was what Caste you were; and since I was an outsider, they weren't quite sure how to treat me, and so the Brahman didn't want me to touch him. You see this young man, they are Brahmans; but I interviewed him to try to find out where he got smallpox because he had to have gotten it from another person, and where he had traveled; and it turned out that he had travelled to a village somewhere, I'm not sure where; where he had received the services of a prostitute for his inauguration into his, you know, Right of Passage, but of course, this was not something that anybody could know about. Melissa McSwigan: Right. Mary Guinan: And it was not something that I would be able to track. You know, to find out that case. In fact, they were very vague about where the village was and how it was. So we just decided then to employ a member of the family, it was a father, to be at the door and then we paid a vaccinator to stay there to vaccinate. We paid the parents money to keep the person in the house-keep the young boy in the house and to get food so he wouldn't come out until we declared him to be non-infectious. So we went about, and I found out that when we go to the villages surrounding it, we didn't have maps, it wasn't like you'd say, "Okay let's draw a five-mile radius around this and try and find some maps to figure out what the radius was or how you could do this." So, we got these rather rudimentary maps and we started going to the villages to try to vaccinate. We found out when people would come - we had a jeep, they were Mahindra &amp; Mahindra jeeps I think is the name of them, and they were provided by the Indian Government, the jeeps; and when the jeeps came and the only time the villagers ever saw a jeep come in was when the Family Planning person came and there was a big initiative in India at that time to reduce the population and to introduce birth control, and they used to pay the men to have a vasectomy, gave them a portable radio was one of the gifts that the men would get. Melissa McSwigan: Mmh! Mary Guinan: And then were these - the Family Planning people had told us that they had to meet every month. They had to have so many vasectomies and so many tubal ligations and they were not terribly receptive people so they saw this jeep coming and they thought it was the Family Planning people and they all ran away. So nobody would be there. So we said, "We couldn't find anybody to vaccinate, everybody disappeared." In India, you know, people would disappear and then reappear; it was so incredible the number of people; when you go to India, all you see is people everywhere. There's never any privacy. You go out, you're on this road and you're there in this wheat growing and things, this farm area and you go, and if something happened, if you broke down, my driver would just shout out, and all of a sudden people would appear and they'd come out of the fields, there were people everywhere. They'd sleep in the fields, they were there, but you know, with the heat they'd be hiding in the shade. So the whole idea of us being Family Planning people caused problems for us to be able to do the immunization. So what we decided to do was to do a survey of the town, to get all the names, and this was something that we understood what the people used to do that gave - what the politicians used to do to give resources to a town or village. They would take a census of the village, and the village then - and then take the census of everybody who lived in each house in the village and maybe there were 50 or 60 or 70 houses in the village or less, and there usually would be sometimes 10 or 15 people living in that one room mud hut. So we would just go in and say we're doing a census; and we'd go to the village Elder and talk to him and tell him first that we were going to do the census; and then we would tell him after we did the census when we had all of the - then we would ask the Elder if we could vaccinate the village and why. If the elder agreed then, we could go and start the vaccination. So we would go, but we knew how many people were there. They would all sort of list all these children and you always knew that there was a child every year, so if you had a one-year-old that look like one, you would look for the baby somewhere underneath, hidden in blanket somewhere there was always a baby. So we would find a baby. It was just amazing, we would ask how old people were and they didn't know how old they were. That wasn't a concept to them, the children how old they were. So we would just guess at their ages, and then we would vaccinate them and vaccinate each village until we completed the circuit. Then I'd come back every once in a while to make sure that the guard was at the door. We had these surprise inspections because people didn't really understand what we were doing. They thought, you know: Okay, they're going to give me money for this, I'll do it, but then when I was out of sight, well maybe not understanding why they needed to keep this person inside, they might not, you know - So we would come back regularly to check every two or three days. Sometimes there wouldn't be the guard at the door and we say, "Okay, where is the guard?" and we had the guard and the vaccinator had a book in which he listed all the people he vaccinated so we'd know who were vaccinated. So that was my first start, and it was smallpox and then I kept finding more smallpox cases. Melissa McSwigan: So that was your first case, but there were more? Mary Guinan: That was my first case, and then as we went from village to village, I'd find another one and declare it then, I would culture the lesion and send it off to the post office and this is a big thing to do, to find a post office that would take this and send it off to Delhi. You'd never know if it would arrive there or not, because sometimes they didn't have stamps at the post office so you couldn't buy stamps and it was a complicated system that you had to try and figure out how to ensure that your specimen got sent. So I kept sending them off and then we kept moving around from village to village; and the person who was in-charge of Uttar Pradesh at the time of the Smallpox Eradication Program was Don Francis and he would come to visit. He came down to visit me about a month and two into it. I lived in a mud hut outside and my paramedical assistant would try and find some place for me to live, that would have a shelter; and sometimes we did and sometimes we didn't. It was very cold at night. But there were all sorts of things; there were rats around that really used to scare me. They'd come in and run around at night and the Indians always respected life. So they never killed anything. The Hindus didn't kill anything and so there would be rats. One morning, there was a rat in my purse and I told my driver there was a rat in my purse and he just opened the purse and let the rat out. Okay! So Don Francis came down to visit to see what we were doing because they wanted to make sure, you know I was new, of what you were really doing and actually, I was a woman and they weren't sure women could do those things at that time. So Don came down and he said, "Listen, this place was declared free of smallpox and you are sending off all these sample saying there's smallpox. Are you sure these are smallpox?" I said, "As sure as I can be. I certainly - all I can say is, to the best of my ability I call them smallpox." "Sure they weren't chickenpox?" "I think they were smallpox, it's a possibility that they were." He said, "Are you sure because you're causing a big sensation here. The leader, the Indian Public Health leader in the area was very upset because he had declared his districts free of smallpox and I was saying it wasn't. So that caused a little political problem. Anyway, it was miles and it would take them several hours to come to where I was, and they went back. Then as I moved toward the other villages that were infected in this area, we had difficulty crossing the rivers. There were three rivers - parts of a river that intersected the villages and each time I would have to cross the river; and it was too deep for the jeep to cross it, so I decided the first day we came to this I said, "I'm going to wigan[inaudible0:41:35] and wade across" because the water was the water is about up to here maybe at my waist, and we're going to wade across with the supplies and everybody would wade across. So I always wore pants because showing your legs is not something that the Hindu women or Muslim women do, so I had made a series of Muslim outfits like pants and a long shirt, a Kurta, I think it was called and that's what Muslim women wore. The Hindu women wore Saris, but the pants were much easier for me to work in and I always kept my head covered. I had very long hair then, it was a braid and I decided before I went to India that I would dye my hair black so I wouldn't look so conspicuous. Melissa McSwigan: Did that work? Mary Guinan: No. Well, you know, when the white roots started coming out, they thought I was going grey; and it got streaked as it went, and I'm pretty tall; so I was taller than what most people saw, so I stuck out in the crowd no matter what. So I decided to roll up my pants-now I tell you that showing legs isn't a good thing in India, and there was nobody around, but after I rolled up my pants and started going across the river, a big crowd came out and there was a huge crowd, and I had rolled up my pants and I'd walked and crossed to the other side to get the supplies over, the vaccine, needles and things. Then we went and did the thing and on return I realized that I'd caused some sensation so I just didn't roll my pants up, I just waded across and word travelled fast, who knows how, but it went to Delhi; and people were saying, "Oh, I heard you went to..." Once a month we would have this meeting and Bill Foege would - Bill Foege was the head of the Indian Smallpox Eradication at the time when I arrived, and he would come up from Delhi. He would go to each of the districts once a month, and he would come to Uttar Pradesh one day a week and then we would all come in from the field, there were number of us; and he was the first person that we would talk with, and we'd take showers, I mean I might not have showered in weeks and weeks. So you would stay at the hotel and meet friends, and they would tell you what was happening, and they'd show you how many cases of smallpox there were and how they were decreasing and how close we were to zero- coming to zero in India; and that UP was winning from Bihar. We were ahead of Bihar. So that was a monthly meeting and when I was coming into town, we would stop at the railroad station and I would know whether Bill Foege was there or not because Bill was very tall, he's 6'6", and they would always know when he came from the railroad station. He was here. So they'd tell me, "He's here." So I would know he was at the hotel. People would know you were with the smallpox program and they'd let to know, I mean, word would travel fast and anything I did was reported. People knew what I was doing and all. That was interesting, I didn't do that again. Melissa McSwigan: How would you - let me interrupt you for a second. How would you say that this experience that you had, the six months that you had in India, how would you say that affected your career after that? Mary Guinan: Well, I became a believer. I believed that this was the way to go. I decided that I was going to have a career in public health because it was so successful. I mean, I couldn't believe it, what you were doing and all the things you were doing and all the problems you were having, and you would come, and it's working. It's actually working, so you were reinvigorated to go out in the field and keep doing what you were doing because you can't really see the results and you often see the errors that are made and sometimes things slipped through the cracks, somebody didn't guard the patient, and did they possibly infect someone else and you had a whole trail of smallpox moving about. You're always worried about that, but it worked. So I decided to work in public health-that changed my life. Melissa McSwigan: Did you keep travelling after that? Did you go to other countries as well? Mary Guinan: Yes, I've been probably all over the world. I've been to Asia: Thailand and China, Japan; and Central and South America. I guess the only place I really haven't been is to Eastern Europe. So it was the - during that time it was the Cold War so there were lots of difficulties getting in and out of countries. But I came back and then I left CDC after my EIS program and then was recruited back to CDC, and then I worked at CDC for 20 years then retired. I was part of the First Aid Task Force so I was a trained Virologist and that's how my career evolved. Melissa McSwigan: It sounds like you faced a lot of challenges before you went for the Smallpox Eradication Campaign. Particularly, you've talked a lot about being a woman and how that presented some obstacles as far as getting into school and so on. Did you find that in this particular campaign that being a woman affected the work that you were doing? You talked a little bit about when Don Francis, I think you said, came to visit you, how they kind of doubted maybe your effectiveness? Mary Guinan: Well, they were worried. You know, as I would've been in Don's place. It turned out they were all smallpox. But I think it did affect the people - I think it helped me a lot. People were much more trusting of a woman than a man in that situation when I'd go into a village. Melissa McSwigan: That was as far as the Indians were concerned? Mary Guinan: Yeah, as far as the Indians were concerned. Because I was such a curiosity to them; and also, people helped me a lot. I told you about these rivers. We had problems traversing the rivers and the only way to get across was a boat, a camel or an elephant. So there were always camel drivers and we would just wait until a camel came along then I would rent the camel and then we'd get across; and how I got back from over the other side; we'd hope another camel would come or somebody would show up with a rowboat and would row us across. We'd pay them to take us across. So one day, while we're working in the village, this local Raja Saab they call him came, and he said, "What are you doing?" And I told him what we were doing and he said, "That's wonderful." He said, "Well, since you're having this difficulty, I have an elephant and I'm going to give you an elephant so you can have this elephant to go across the river." So I got this elephant. I mean elephants swim and their wonderful. Camels are nasty and they want to bite you. It's really difficult getting on a camel. They'd turn around and bite you; and the elephant, very sweet and there was a Mahout, an elephant driver, and he said to me, "When the elephant swims over this river, he will take you up in his trunk, so you won't get wet" I said, "No. No. I'm not doing that. I'll get wet-it's okay if I get wet." So when we would go across, he would take the Mahout. The elephant would take - it was a female, she would take the Mahout in her trunk and carry him over, and swim to the other side and then I'd go; and then we'd come back and then somehow somebody would call an elephant. The elephant would come and then take me back to the other side. Of courts Don Francis heard about this naturally, and he came saying he wants an elephant ride. He came down, he says, "I want my first ride." So he got an elephant ride. So I'm not sure, I think this man, because I was a woman, he thought I needed help in getting across and so, he gave me an elephant. I gave it back to him. I didn't take it home. Melissa McSwigan: That would be kind of hard to fit and you're carry- on luggage I'm sure. What would you say is the most memorable moment that you have from your time in India with the smallpox program, the memory that sticks out the most? Mary Guinan: Well the memory is - and the first is the cultural shock of going to a country where you don't know the morays and learning them it's a bit of a - it was one of those culture shocks that it would take years to adapt to, you take these small steps. But I think that the most exciting thing was that it worked and that these monthly meetings that we would go to, we would learn that it was working. It was just - and that whole idea that this is actually going to work. I mean, it's actually going to work was intoxicating. So that was the most wonderful thing about - and the thing I remember, it was effective. Melissa McSwigan: Well, is there anything else that you would like to add, to tell future public health professionals like myself about the time and the program and so on that you would like to share? Mary Guinan: I don't think so. I don't know what I'd say except, an opportunity like this where your Government was doing something and you have an opportunity for public service, it's just - I don't know that I got any better satisfaction of anything I've done in my lifetime, than feeling like I participated with so many other people from other nations to do something that improved people's lives and you had an opportunity, I mean it was a privilege to have that opportunity, so I feel that our government who was doing what I thought, such terrible things, but somewhere there was someone doing this wonderful thing. It was in these rickety old buildings at CDC that nobody ever heard of then, CDC wasn't in the spotlight, and all these Quonset[0:53:41] huts out in [inaudible 0:53:43], that's what people were living in. I mean this is CDC and it was these old Government buildings, but these people planned; imagine, they planned as well. They were part of the planning of this momentous event, and I feel very privileged to have been a part of it. So it was that sense of, I guess, if you have that opportunity to do something that's outside of anything you could possibly do as an individual, do as a team, then that will surely be one of the greatest satisfactions in your life. Melissa McSwigan: Well, thank you very much for your time and thank you for sharing your stories. Mary Guinan: Okay. [End of audio - 0:54:36] </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nxg5wfuUAtE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Type The nature or genre of the resource interviews motion pictures moving image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008-07-10 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/16rrr emory:16rrr Subject The topic of the resource WHO Smallpox Eradication CDC India Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 11782080000 bytes video/x-dv Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource McSwegin, Melissa (Interviewer) Guinan, Mary (Interviewee); Epidemiologist Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Centers for Disease Control Title A name given to the resource GUINAN, MARY Description An account of the resource Dr. Mary Guinan describes her experiences as an epidemiologist in India in 1973. Language A language of the resource English