25 12 2286 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/e8d95f7173811409980a63464e63e66b.JPG 4e66e5b19bd4865e9a73ad6accb9f1b7 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> Media Powerpoints, Recorded lectures, movies, training films, and interviews Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eN7WZ2BHy60" 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 presentations (communicative events) motion pictures moving image Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006-07-15 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/15msd emory:15msd Subject The topic of the resource USAID Measles CDC WHO Smallpox Eradication Reunion Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 2305800000 bytes video/x-dv Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lane, Mike (Speaker); CDC 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 LANE: EPIDEMIOLOGY OF SMALLPOX Description An account of the resource Dr. J. Michael Lane is introduced by Stan Foster. He describes the epidemiologic differences between smallpox and measles and describes how this led to the programs to control the diseases. Language A language of the resource English https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/2dd8502586532b735e0efac9e5e63267.png 462310ecc66a1f6e45e7ba91a296bd8c 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 Ebola 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. Original Format If the image is of an object, state the type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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 EBOLA – Sierra Leone Description An account of the resource A handwashing station at an Ebola checkpoint between Port Loko and the Western District, Sierra Leone. The water containers were filled with a water and chlorine solution and could be manipulated by a foot pedal, created out of branches and cords, to tip the containers towards the user. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Laurie Kamimoto Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource December 2014 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 20958 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Laurie Kamimoto (Photographer) https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/fbcd4fca59aba227cfaaf106ed086ea5.pdf 6fb35b03db115f5cecdcf8fc011cbf30 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 HIV/AIDS 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 AUTOPSY FINDINGS IN HAITIANS Description An account of the resource Unusual Causes of Death in Haitians Residing in Miami, High Prevalence of Opportunistic Infections. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lee B. Moskowitz, MD; Paul Kory, MD; Joseph C. Chan, MD; Harry W. Haverkos, MD; Frances K. Conley, MD; George T. Hensley, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Journal of the American Medical Association. Volume 250, No. 9 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource September 2, 1983 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The Journal of the American Medical Association. A peer-reviewed medical journal published 48 times a year by the American Medical Association https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/1c65f3d386371438394094513edd7990.pdf c2685e945333e92242fd286851ae17aa 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> 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/. Type The nature or genre of the resource government records text Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 12th 1967 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/83qc5 emory:83qc5 Subject The topic of the resource USAID Regional Office CDC WHO Smallpox Eradication Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 6586750 bytes application/pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lythcott, Geogre (Author); CDC Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Centers for Disease Control Title A name given to the resource REPORT – Lagos: April 1967 Description An account of the resource “Regional Project Office and Field Monthly Report No. 3,” a typical monthly report of activities in the West and Central African countries from the Regional Office in Lagos to the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) Smallpox Eradication Program Headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Describes administrative details that confronted the program in the field. By Dr J.D. Millar, George Lythcott, Regional Smallpox Eradication Program (SEP) Director, Communicable Disease Center. Language A language of the resource English CDC Regional Office Report Smallpox Eradication USAID WHO https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/34a34aeab93d1941f3c237606a0de740.pdf 6cc0538555073f486597f5d39ce19408 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> 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/. Type The nature or genre of the resource government records text Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource February 1967 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/83q9w emory:83q9w Subject The topic of the resource USAID Multiple countriesj CDC WHO Smallpox Eradication Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 6539071 bytes application/pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lythcott, George (Author); CDC ; Regional Director Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Centers for Disease Control Centers for Disease Control Title A name given to the resource MEMORANDUM – February 23 1967 Description An account of the resource Memorandum TO: Dr. J.D. Millar, Chief Smallpox Eradication Program FROM: Dr. G.I. Lythcott, Chief Smallpox Measles Program, RPO REGARDING: Status Report as of February 20, 1967. Contains details of immunization and epidemiological activities as well as administrative activities and problems Language A language of the resource English CDC Multiple Countries Smallpox Eradication USAID WHO https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/e113e853947af7579d9b4f13ede504df.pdf 1db50d086be9f3d609148c7a9bcfc8d1 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> 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/. Type The nature or genre of the resource government records text Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 16th, 1967 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/83qd9 emory:83qd9 Subject The topic of the resource USAID Regional Office Report CDC WHO Smallpox Eradication Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 11284126 bytes application/pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lythcott, George (Author); CDC; Regional SEP Dorector Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Centers for Disease Control Title A name given to the resource REPORT – Lagos: May 1967 Description An account of the resource “Regional Project Office and Field Monthly Report No. 4,” a monthly report of activities in the West and Central African countries from the Regional Office in Lagos to the Communicable Disease Center Smallpox Eradication Program Headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Contains sections on each of the countries in the program. By George Lythcott, Regional Smallpox Eradication Program [SEP] Director, Communicable Disease Center. Language A language of the resource English CDC Regional Office Report Smallpox Eradication USAID WHO https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/39ed46c91bdb1476732b08e5f2e4c3e6.JPG 32687499f0714d9ee0066f9c36569ca1 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/e0f226bf37f678c446589add4fd0fc1e.pdf 0f1d2df5de2ded7fa0b2ae8b01ef0733 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 Jeannie Lythcott on July 17, 2006, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, about her experience and involvement with the West African Smallpox Eradication Project. The interview is being conducted as a part of a reunion marking the 40th anniversary of the launch of the program. The interviewer is David Sencer. Sencer: Jeannie, do you want to tell me a little bit about your early years? Where were you born, what were your parents like? Lythcott: I was born in Leeds, in Yorkshire, England, and I was born in Leeds because my mom had to go to the hospital. I was the only 1 of her 5 children who had to be delivered in a hospital. We grew up in a little village called Rye Hill, partway between Leeds and Sheffield, a coal-mining town. My dad was the only child of coal miners, and he won a scholarship to go to the local grammar school, but his parents wouldn't pay the fee-what would be maybe a dollar, now-to go to that school. And so he was down in the mine at 14. He took himself to night school. He was drafted in World War II. He got in the Royal Signals Corps, and when he got home, he went to college on a program for servicemen. He became a science teacher and grew to become the headmaster of the only school in which he taught. So education for Dad was absolutely prime. Mom had gone to the local high school, and so they were both incredibly bright folks, and with 5 children. I was born in 1939, at the beginning of World War II, and some of my earliest memories are about gas masks and being evacuated. You know, bombs were dropped on Leeds. I grew up speaking Yorkshire, and our teachers spent a good 12 years trying to have us approximate the Queen 's English. This is how Yorkshire sounds. I'm going to give you a Yorkshire toast: [toast in Yorkshire, which Dr. Sencer can't understand] About 6% of students went to university in those days. I applied for and was accepted to Majesty University. Because our family was so poor, I got a scholarship from the government as a result of the 1944 Education Act. The government paid every penny for me-bus fare from home, food, everything-to go to university. If that had not been the case, I couldn't have gone. I taught in England for a couple of years and then decided that I wanted to go around the world, knowing somehow that my experience of education was limited by the British system. So my thought was that I would teach in former British colonies, where some things would be recognizable. And at that time, David, I was going to end up this grand tour of the globe in America, that being the far end of the spectrum. And after that, I was going to go home and become headmistress of a school for girls. I began in Ghana. I arrived in August of 1962. George Lythcott and his 4 teenage children, ages 12 to16, had arrived in Accra with an American team the month before I got there. He was there as Deputy Director of a medical research team to help Ghana build a national health institute manned by Ghanaian scientists and molded after NIH [National Institutes of Health]. We lived very close to each other. I met the family on September 9, about a month after I arrived, and we became very, very close very quickly. It's amazing. George had to go back to the United States in October or November of that year. Three of the children, Ruthie, George, and Mike, were in boarding school in Achimota, so they would be taken care of while he was gone. The youngest one, Steven, was going to a day school, an American international school. So I went to see George the night before he was to leave for 9 weeks to go back to the United States. His household goods hadn't yet arrived from America. We were relative strangers, you understand. I sat there in his house helping him to pack his bag, and he kept giving me money. He gave me 3 blank, signed checks just in case anything happened to his children. I mean, his trust in me from the start, it was amazing when I think about it. And so we worked side by side. I was there to teach physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics to girls who were given a scholarship. They were bypassing secondary school and being prepared for a degree nursing program, which was unusual in 1962. So that's what I was doing there, and continued to do, until December 1965. Kwame Nkrumah [the first Prime Minister of Ghana] had fallen into disfavor with the American government, and as a result of some of the things that had happened, the United States decided to pull out most of George's team. There were 22 scientists of different disciplines there. The United States decided to pull most of them out as a political statement, but the Ghanaian scientist with whom they'd been working made a plea to the American Ambassador at the time to say, "Can't we keep a scientist-to-scientist relationship?" And so George stayed with 1 technician. But I had upset the Ghanese government, so my contract was not renewed in 1965. Sencer: How did you upset them? Lythcott: In the summer of '65, those who taught in this pre-nursing program said that, for the first time, they were willing to leave as a group (they were very close friends) to go on vacation because they felt that they could leave the college in my hands. We were on vacation, and they felt that they could leave the administrative details to me and they would come back at the beginning of school. Around this time, we had administered an entrance exam to over 2,000 girls from all over Ghana. We had announced in the newspaper when the exam would be given and when we would announce the results. And those results were to be given on a specific date, maybe September 28 or something. While the women were gone, the Minister of Education in the government called up the college and wanted to know whether his niece had been accepted for the pre-nursing program. And so my reply was that the exams had been scored, but we hadn't done the final analysis, and as we had reported in the paper, all of the results would be available at the same time to the public on September 28. I had the good sense to write that in a letter to the director of the college. But he didn't like what I'd done; he just didn't like it. But I stood my ground. So I wasn't expelled from the country, but my contract wasn't renewed. I'm not sure of the details of how this happened, but I ended up working for NIH in Ghana for 6 months on the Burkett's tumor project. I was responsible for getting the tissue samples, getting the osmium tetroxide, and we did 2 other lab manifuplations and then. I hand-carried the samples in dry ice to a plane at midnight to get to Washington, D.C. So that was my last 6 months in Ghana. And then, in November or December of '65, George met D. A. [Donald A. Henderson] in New York somewhere, and they'd talked about the smallpox program. So, in January and February, I think, he was roaming around the 20 countries to be in the eradication effort, getting the agreements signed. We got married in Ghana on January 17, 1966, in an incredible ceremony. So there I was. George headed off to get these agreements signed. We came back to Atlanta in that summer to help get the team oriented to Africa.. So those are my beginnings. Let me tell you 1 other thing. It relates to where I am now. When I was at the University of Manchester, I had applied, on the basis of recommendation from my professor, for a Ph.D. program in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. There was an interesting morphological problem. There was a weed in the prairies; when you pulled up a plant, if you left any little piece of root, each root had the possibility of making a whole new plant. So the weed was noxious from that point of view. They wanted somebody to study that plant from a morphological perspective. So I got the scholarship. It paid for everything, but I couldn't afford to get there. The professor said he made every effort to try to get me there and found a scholarship from the Dreyfus Company, $1,600, $1,700, something like that. It was a scholarship for post-university work at any college or university in our dominions or colonies, but it stipulated that it was for a male student. And they said they were so happy if somebody would try to change it, but it would take them 5 years. So I went into teaching. Sencer: You got married instead. Lythcott: Yes. I met George. That derailed my whole plan. Yes. Sencer: You came here in '66 for the training course? Lythcott: Yes, yes. Sencer: Was this your first experience in the States? Lythcott: No. My first time in the United States was 1968. We'd been married in '66, and I was still a British citizen. We found out that when an American official was part of the diplomatic corps, marries an alien overseas, and is returning to post overseas, that the residency requirement for US citizenship is waived, which makes good sense. Also, you can be naturalized in any court that's meeting. So in 1968, I took all of the steps to come in on an immigration visa. I had studied up the kazoo. We found out that the federal court was meeting in Washington, D.C. I was in New York, pregnant, so I went up for the day to Washington, D.C. to take this exam. I took the oath, in a very moving ceremony. It came time for the exam. Well, I had studied. This judge sat there, and he said, "How many arms of government?" "What do we call this form of government?" Then the next question was, "So tell me what you know about the Executive Branch." And in all seriousness, I said to him, "You mean everything I know?" And he looked at me, over the top of his glasses, and he said, "Well, why don't you just start, and I'll tell you when to stop." Well, I started, and I had this down. It was like unpacking the files from memory, you know, and so on and so on I went. He didn't ask me another single question. It was amazing. Sencer: So, in the smallpox program when you went back after '66, George had traveled around getting the agreements signed. Lythcott: Right. Sencer: And then what happened? Lythcott: Most of the agreements were signed, but not all, when we came back for the training program here in 1966. Nigeria was still the very difficult one. And if I recall, 50% of the population was in Nigeria, and I don't know if 50% of the smallpox cases were there also, but without Nigeria, this program made no good sense. Back then, CDC had a program in Atlanta for the families while the guys were going through their training. There were some cultural events for children. So George went off for a week to Nigeria to get the agreement signed. But when he got there, all of these hostilities between the north and the east had just erupted, and nobody, but nobody, was interested in thinking about a smallpox eradication-measles control program. So it is my understanding that he did everything that he could. And people would check in with him. It wasn't easy to make long-distance calls back in those days. You could hear the ocean, I think, in the background. You had to book your call 3 hours ahead of time. And so, when we knew a call had been booked, I would actually be in the hallway, waiting. D. A. and Billy and various people would be there, and I'd just wait in the hall outside for messages. George was an incredibly social person; he had people skills up the kazoo. It's funny, because at the same time, he was also very much of a homebody and a loner. He would say often things like, "I don't care about anything else, just as long as I've got you and my baby at home." But when he was out there, he had people skills up the kazoo. And people found themselves talking to him easily. He adored women, and women adored him. From his days in Ghana, he knew about the underworld, you know, those CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] spies, and so on. Actually, the CIA tried to recruit George, and George came home and told me about all of it. But he told some of the things that they knew about him and about me, and I said, "I don't think you need to be a part of that." So he gave it up, although it would have meant a whole lot of money, which would have been helpful with 4 children. But he was used to that, sort of thinking, where messages can be passed back and forth that can ameliorate situations before they erupt. He was used to that sort of level of conversation. So George was at a cocktail party in Lagos He'd been there about 6 or 7 weeks. And nobody knew much about the new young leader of Nigeria, General Yakubu Gowan. As president of the federation, he was in the middle of Yoruba country, but he was from the Jos Plateau. So he didn't have his own people, his own tribe, around him. So it must have been very tenuous for him in the beginning. And so it was hard for George to find connections with him because there weren't many in that milieu. So George was at this party, chitchatting with the wife of one of the Yoruba diplomats there whom he'd come to know. And George said to this lady-it was very serendipitous-"He's such a handsome young man. And he's not married, I hope. This is the army," some conversation like this. And the woman leaned over and she said, "Oh, no, he has a girlfriend." And so it was through that contact that George then arranged an introduction with. the girlfriend [I believe mistress would be a more apt term. djs] And so George told the young woman about the smallpox program, what it would mean to children in all the 20 countries, and that if Nigeria didn't sign, there would be no program. He gave her that understanding, and she went to the President the next day, and there it was the signed agreement.. Yeah. Sencer: As you say, he had people skills. Lythcott: Oh, he did, he did. Sencer: Did you do much traveling with George, or were you a homebody? Lythcott: I did some, but not much. Once the civil war erupted, we were told by the American government that they were not requiring dependents to leave but that if we left, we couldn't come back. So I actually did very little traveling. I went to Abidjan, to that meeting. And then little Julie was born in November of 1967. Sencer: Where was she born? Lythcott: In Lagos, Nigeria. Sencer: Which hospital? Lythcott: It was a Nigerian hospital on the mainland. She was delivered by midwives at the hospital. George brought my mother from England to visit us, so she came for about 3 weeks, the first and only time she ever flew in an airplane. So, of necessity, we were home. Sencer: You want to tell us some of George's printable exploits? Lythcott: One that I didn't tell the other night was about Colonel Labusquiere leader of OCEAC [Organization de Coordination pur la Lutte contre Endemies d'Afrique Central]; he was a formidable character. As I remember it, he wasn't at all persuaded that the Americans had any role in the OCEAC countries; he thought that the French were doing just fine, thank you very much. In the case of smallpox, I think he was absolutely right, but measles control was something he would gladly give up. But as George used to describe him, the Colonel was just puffed up with national pride. Any notions that Americans were going to be coming to help them were just impossible. So we were in Lagos, and we got a call that Colonel Labusquiere, his wife, and his mother, who was traveling with them from France to visit them in Cameroon (I think that's where they lived), were going to have to lay over in Lagos, Nigeria, because there was something wrong. They couldn't fly all the way. I don't know what it was. But they were arriving in Lagos, and of course they would stay with us. And I was in a panic now. What are we going to do? So we've got Labusquiere, this formidable character. As far as I knew, he spoke very little English. And his mother was coming too. Sencer: Right. Lythcott: So I put the word out among the wives of those who worked in the regional office-Bonnie Flanders [Bonnie Jean Flanders], Ilze [Ilze Henderson], and Dotty Hicks [Dorothy Hicks] and so on-that if anybody, anywhere, had any French literature-magazines, books, anything-that I could at least put in their rooms, to let me know. One of them came up with a magazine, and I got the guestrooms ready. And you know how they did things in 1966. So I put the magazine down on the bedside table for the mother, and just flipped it open to a page, and placed it next to a little vase of flowers. It turns out the page depicted a vineyard, and this was their property. So completely serendipitous! There it was. The next morning, the mother said, "How did you know?" So they come, we're struggling through, in French. You know, the astonishing thing about George was that he didn't speak other languages, at least not at this point. He would have a few words here and there, but that was a tribute to his people skills as well. It was all eye contact and body language. Anyway, we're struggling through dinner. I think Ilze and Rafe [Ralph H. Henderson] came. I was struggling with my French. I hadn't used it in a long, long time, but it seemed to be okay. And we were getting through. It was a kind of a nice occasion. So the next morning, at breakfast, we got up. I mentioned that I hoped that they had spent a pleasant night, and so on. And all of a sudden the colonel begins speaking in English that is much better than my French. That old son-of-a-gun. Sencer: Yeah. Lythcott: And so he said that it had been a wonderful visit, and he said the first thing that he needed to do was to toast George because in one 24-hour period, this man had caused his mother and his wife to fall in love.. And that's when the conversation about the vineyards came up. He thanked us for the evening and how they appreciated us trying to put this together. And George always thought that was a turning point in that relationship. You have all of the other stories about the passports and things, I'm sure. Sencer: Well, we don't have them in your words. Actually, I don't think those were recorded the other night, about filling in his passport. Lythcott: George was traveling with Jay Friedman [Jay S. Friedman]. I think they were trying to go into Abidjan. George realized, as he's going up to passport control, that this [unclear]. "I still have these passports. Maybe I should send those to CDC. That would be fun, wouldn't it?" with all the extra pages stuck in, and so on and so on. And so he looked and found that his visa had expired the day before. What was he going to do? Somebody else goes through, and then George comes along. The passport officer was a young woman. So George said to her, in his own inimitable style, "Hello, honey. How are you doing? May I borrow your pen?" And so she said, "Here's one." So she took out a pen, gave it to George, and on the desk right in front of her, he drew around the outside edge of the visa and changed the date. So the date was, I don't know, tomorrow. So if it said the 17th, he changed it to the 19th or something, right there. And he gave her his passport, returned her pen, and she said, "Fine, thank you very much. Have a good day, big boy." Another time I think he just ripped out the old page of his passport with the old visas that were attached and put it in his passport. And then there was the time, it was Julie's first birthday, so November 28, 1968, George had been at a conference with a whole lot of other people in Congo Brazzaville. I'm not sure why, but George didn't get on the plane to come to Lagos as we had thought. But he had let me know that he had invited 3 Russian physicians to Thanksgiving at our house. This was a big deal because George cooked the turkey. George could cook like you wouldn't believe. He put it on a spit on the grill outside. And I was allowed nowhere near this machine. So I expecting George home, and he didn't come, and about 10 o'clock in the morning, the 3 Russian physicians arrived. And I'm panicking a little bit. I have the turkey all dressed, it's all ready to go, but I haven't heard from George. It's Julie's first birthday. I knew he was going to be there if he could. And nobody seemed to know what had happened to him. Finally, about noon, totally unexpectedly, George breezed in through the front door, dropped his suitcase and his coat, and went right into the kitchen and said, "Is the turkey ready?" and I said, "Yes." And so I followed behind him, and he said, "Did the Russians come?" I said, "Yes, they're outside by the pool." And he said, "Oh, by the way, your brother said to say hello." My brothers are both in England. It made no sense to me. But later, as I got the story, he had persuaded the people in Congo Brazzaville that he absolutely had to get to Lagos, Nigeria, he just had to. And so they entered into this whole problem-solving with him. You know, that was the art, that he got people to problem-solve with him. So they said, "Well, we can't get you to Lagos, but we can get you to Rome, and maybe you can get home from Rome." Know this. This was all on the ticket from Congo Brazzaville to Lagos, so there was no extra charge or anything involved here. And so he got to Rome, and the same spiel, and he tells a story and, of course, he's been talking to the stewardesses on the plane. It's like he's got the whole world looking out for him. They sent him to London in time to get the flight-BOAC, I think it was-from London to Nigeria. While he was in London, he called my brother. Oh, man. Sencer: What were some of your high points in Africa, besides having Julie? Lythcott: Well, that was definitely the high point. I think the only big conference that I knew about was the one that we had in '69 in Lagos. It must have been in the spring. Most of the photographs that I sent are from that conference. I remember 2 things about that conference. One is that George was bound and determined to have a diplomatic coup, which was that all of these contiguous countries would finally agree that a smallpox outbreak could be attended to by the smallpox vaccination team that was closest to the site, regardless of which side of the border the team was on. And this was huge. So that from Nigeria, you could go into Niger, and vice versa, for the purpose of containing smallpox. And they reached that agreement at that meeting. So that was a high point for George. The other thing was that George had arranged-he was so proud of this-for a sophisticated method of simultaneous translation. Translators were sent in from Geneva, and they were set up in little booths. But, of course, it was dependent on the electricity working, and West Africa being West Africa at the time, electricity working was not something that you could count on. So George had requested that the translators be able to move into consecutive translation as well. Well, that's what happened. The electricity went out. And I have this fabulous memory of these translations, which were really improvisational performances. When the translator was translating from the French into English, the shoulders would go back and be squared, the neck would be buttoned up, elbows tucked in, and the correct accent. And then the same guy, when translating from English to French, would tousle his hair, undo his shirt, and he'd be scratching and all kinds of things. It was an absolutely wonderful performance. I sought them out afterwards at the cocktail party, and they said what a joy it was for them to go back to this old skill that they used to have but didn't get to use anymore. Sencer: Was one of them mustached? Lythcott: Definitely. The other was a young woman who was on one of those photographs. I remembered her name: Eleanor Trench I think one of them may have been in that photograph. Sencer: The mustached one was one of the WHO's [World Health Organization] translators, and he was just magnificent, just magnificent. Lythcott: It must have been him. Sencer: As you said, he would fall right into whichever language he was working in. He was great. Why do you think things worked so well in Africa, or worked as well as they did? Lythcott: You know, that's a complicated question. But I was thinking about Bill Foege's presentation, the final one at the seminar the other day. Bill's thought was that nobody really believed that they could pull it off. There may have been an exception because I know George believed it. He came back from meeting with D. A., and he didn't say, "We're going to try to eradicate smallpox." He said, "We're going to eradicate smallpox," you know-and control measles. The question for him was not whether it could be done. It was just, how in the world are we going to get it done? So he believed it. I don't know who did the interviewing, but given the issues of racism and lack of cultural sensitivity in our nation at that time, the selection of those young folks was amazing. But it also may have been their youth. Because they were very young, you know. When you're 23, 24, 28 years old and if you're smart, you do believe you can do anything. I thought I could run any school in the world better than anybody else who was doing it at that time. Sencer: You probably could. Lythcott: Yeah. So it's that chutzpah of youth. But I think the fact that there was a very small American presence in each country was a fabulous decision. I think if there'd been 10 CDCers per country, they would have coalesced into a tight little team, whereas being only 1 or 2, they trained their counterparts and worked with them; that was critical to this process. But because there was usually only 1 in every country and the medical officer covered several countries, there was a sense that you were not entirely isolated. And that's why George traveled 70% of the time. I calculated it. He was gone from Lagos 70% of the time. He needed to do that. He needed to have them know that somebody was on the ground caring about things. And, you know, he did a lot of caring for families. . So I think it was that. So there was the animus of can-do. I think the other thing was that there was probably a little of that rambunctious devilry in all of these young people- sort of an obstinacy that, if you hit a wall, it wasn't going to get you down. It was just something to get over. I think there was that. Clearly, for the team from the United States, that link, also incredibly tenuous-you know, how long it took to make an overnight call; you sent telegrams, and relied on a way of communicating that seems so old when we compare it to today's world-but that link, tenuous as it was, was also incredibly strong. I don't think for a minute that George ever thought that there was anyone back in the United States that would say no, would say we can't do it. It was that can-do spirit again. And you have to give credit truly to the country nationals also. It wouldn't have worked if they hadn't wanted it to work. There were more ways than we could ever invent in our culture for not getting it done in West Africa. Do you remember when Rafe and somebody went to the subcontinent to try to help WHO get that off the ground? I think they were there for about 3 weeks for an initial conversation with the Ministry of Health. So for 3 weeks, they'd met with the Minister of Health. He had been very courteous, very engaging. They'd had wonderful conversations. But there wasn't anything happening, nothing! And it was about time for them to come home. They had reached a level of maximum frustration, so they requested a meeting with him. And he said, "Welcome, and good journey home" and so on. And they said, "Before we go, we need to tell you how frustrating this is. We thought we might be able to go home and report that something had been done." And he said- and this is the line, the actual quote-"What would you do if a friend, as a gift, gave you an elephant? We can't cope with that big thing!" So the country nationals, they could have found ways to not get it done, to not enter into the problem-solving. And you have to believe that it was because they knew what a gift it was to keep children well. Sencer: I'm now giving editorial comment. So many of the people that went from the United States had worked in state health departments, where they saw their job not to be the leader, but to get behind the leader and gently push: Let's get this done; let's get this done. And I think a lot of that was part of the success in Africa, that they recognized the primacy of the native leaders. Lythcott: Yes. Sencer: And recognized that there were ways to get them to move. Lythcott: Mm-hmm, yeah. Sencer: I notice you're wearing a bracelet. Lythcott: Yes. Sencer: Tell me about it. Lythcott: I will. One of the extraordinary things about that time, which is evident for all of us who came this weekend, is that it was a short time in our lives. I'm 67 years old. The smallpox program was 3 years; Ghana, before that, lasted 4 years. Seven years is a very small part of a lifetime, but it was life-changing. We all learned things. We all learned a way of being there. We weren't there as art collectors; we weren't there out of curiosity. We were there as national, you know, the old National Geographic notion of, will there be curiosities? Jim Lewis [James O. Lewis] was telling a story on Saturday night about how the truck he was in had driven into this pond or this mud in the road, and the driver had assured them that they would get out. They were knee-deep in mud. People just turned up on bicycles and helped them get this truck out of the mud and refused payment and seemed offended to having even been offered it. And Jim said that since then, he always stops to help on the roadside. So, my point being that we all have remembrances of that. So, I've put on umpteen numbers of pounds, so I can't wear my African clothing anymore. I just have 1 dress that I can wear. But I wear it often. When I put it on, it puts me back in that part of the world. So the other day I was co-teaching a course with a professor friend of mine at Stanford. He was delayed considerably. When he got there, he said he'd had trouble with his car on the way. I said, "Now I'm going to use an Africanism at Stanford." He had trouble with his car. And my immediate response was, "Oh, sorry." And he said, "Don't be sorry. It's not your fault." And I said, "It's the West African sorry," sorry that the world did this to you. Another memory, when Georgia died. In Nigeria, if they came to your office and you weren't there, there was this phrase, "I came and I met your absence." It's the notion that there's a presence of your absence as well as the absence of your presence. And they're not the same. Sencer: You mentioned life-changing.. How did it change your life? Lythcott: It taught me that I needed to revise my sense of my own country. I needed to give up this notion of glorious British history and acknowledge that some of British history was an inglorious thing. Nobody had taught me in England about our role in the slave trade, or that there even was one. I specialized in the sciences. I gave up studying history at Henry VII to specialize in the sciences. But I don't think that they taught that in British schools anyway. How the raj came to be is an incredibly important issue. I had to reshape how I walked on planet Earth. So I think that that made me, as a human being, open to the difficulty of understanding cross-cultures and being with cross-cultures. One of the things that we talk about in academia is this notion of white privilege and how hard it is when you are in the position of privilege, which is almost always tacit. You just don't know yourself well enough to be think across cultures. So I think it did that for me. And the experience taught me the role of sharing, of not holding onto objects too hard, of the extended family, of what you have you have to share, and that kind of thing. And so, in lots of ways, George and I became who we were as a result of being in Africa. So I just wanted to say that now, Julie, our daughter, and her husband and her 2 children, and I pooled our resources and we bought a house together in Palo Alto. We never could have done it on our own resources. So we're living together under the same roof, a situation fraught with potential dangers, you know, the old mother-daughter thing, your mother-in-law. And we said at the outset that we knew it was going to be difficult and that we wouldn't hide it under the table. We'd make sure that we put it on top. It's been such an incredible journey for Julie and I. Julie is all set to write a book about it. One of the incredible things about George was that he never stopped living. He changed his mind on some really big things as an older person, as a 60-odd-year-old, as a 72-year- old. It's quite astonishing, you know. But I think once you've been in a situation where your whole world, the things that you're sure about, have to be totally examined, you can see yourself whole and confident and competent, having gone through that change. Sencer: Yes. What's Julie doing now? Lythcott: Julie is dean of freshmen at Stanford, and just newly promoted to associate vice-provost. She just completed her 4th year, and they absolutely adore her. Every year they've changed her role and brought her more into the centrality of what's happening at the university. This year, one of the things she initiated was that the incoming freshmen would read 3 books, or they could choose 1 of 3. Stanford will have the authors there, during orientation, so that there will be a conversation between the authors and the freshmen. They chose books on Afghanistan, Haiti, and a collection of short stories about mothers and daughters. Sencer: Carrying On the Tradition. Lythcott: Carrying On the Tradition. That's exactly right. She has George's oratorical skills, and she has George's charisma. You know, I saw George walk into a typical West African cocktail party (that's how people there spent their evenings), into a gathering of 80 people, and the room changed when he walked in. He had that power. Julie has that power too. Sencer: I'll tell you a story about George. We were in Mali and going out to the Dogon country. This was at the time of the 25th millionth vaccination. And we stopped at a little rest house way out in the middle of nowhere. At that time, Mali was very Chinese dominated. We walked in to the rest house. George was in a big orange jumpsuit. There were 3 Chinese in there, and they came over to him thinking him to be Malian, and George said, "Howdy, brothers!" And those Chinese turned tail and left, realizing he was an American. Lythcott: Oh, man! Yeah. George was with the first team that went into China after Nixon went. And then he went a second time. The second time, he was walking on the Great Wall of China, and he heard someone call out behind him, "George Lythcott?" Can't help Can I just tell you how D.A. looked after us in Atlanta? Sencer: Please. Lythcott: We were living in a motel, and D. A. was persuaded that trouble was brewing in the motel. We were breaking the segregation laws in several states at that time. I know that. And so he moved us for the duration to the apartment of at Unitarian minister. And then, while we were still here, George had to go to Washington for some reason, I'm not sure why. We were newly married that year, and I had hardly seen George. You know, he'd been roaming around West and Central Africa since we got married. Three days after we got married, he left. And then he was gone for 9 weeks in the summer. So George said, "I want you to come with me." The idea was that we would go on the overnight train from Atlanta to Washington, getting into the Washington on the sleeper train at 6:30 in the morning. But D. A. was very worried about us, as was George. So they got the plan together, which was that both George and D. A-and I don't know how tall D. A. is, about 6'; George was 6'2½"-with their raincoats on, unbuttoned, would get to the railroad station, with me, and then we would walk fast. I'm 5'½" tall. Their raincoats would flap open, and I would be hidden behind these raincoat flaps, and they would hustle me on the train. And that's what they did. And all was well. And then the last thing involved the chairman of the department in Oklahoma. He had come from Mississippi and had been told at his interview, "We have a black American on the faculty. How do you feel about it?"And the man had said, "Oh, just fine, just fine." And then a week or 2 after he became department chair, he called George in and said, "You need to know that I can't have anyone on my faculty whom I can't invite home to dinner." Later, that same guy applied for a position to Johns Hopkins. All we knew was George got a brown paper envelope. In it was a letter of application from this guy, and D. A.'s response on a little office memo. D. A. just wrote on it, "Turn of the screw." So D. A. looked after us in really important ways. Sencer: Yes. Well, thank you for talking. Lythcott: Oh, you're welcome. Sencer: And we'll sign off now at 10:25. Thank you very much. Lythcott: Thank you. # # # </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/310129775%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-3IgEq&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 2006-07-16 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/158q3 emory:158q3 Subject The topic of the resource Smallpox Eradication USAID WHO CDC Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 585786768 bytes audio/x-aiff Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sencer, David (Interviewer); CDC; Former Director of CDC Lythcott, Jeannie (Interviewee); CDC; Wife of Regional Director 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 LYTHCOTT, JEAN Description An account of the resource Jeannie Lythcott, widow of George Lythcott, who was the Director of the West African Regional Office of the Smallpox Eradication Program in Lagos Nigeria from 1966-69. Jeannie, originally from England, tells how she came to work in Ghana and met and married George. She narrates some of her husband's escapades working for the Smallpox Eradication Program and how it changed her life. Language A language of the resource English https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/ce6d71399b1e10ce650ec61378c45bd7.JPG 7bbc831d39115f236f81f7669eebe8cb 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. 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Jeannie also speaks feelingly of the issues of mixed marriage, the American in Africa, and the difficulties of being black in the United Sates. Language A language of the resource English https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/8ca384dc613330cdff85e9ac0e4551b9.jpg 49b56c7c047af938f6c6fe763bc500aa 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 1248 Width 1863 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. 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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 1966 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/15cc1 emory:15cc1 Subject The topic of the resource CDC Smallpox Eradication USAID WHO Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 251499 bytes image/jpeg Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mack, Tom (Owner); CDC Title A name given to the resource SEP TEAM – West Africa Description An account of the resource A color photograph of Rafe Henderson (left), Bob Woodson (center), and Tom Mack (right), laying the groundwork for the Smallpox Eradication Program [SEP] on an early trip to West Africa. 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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 1966 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/15ckv emory:15ckv Subject The topic of the resource CDC Smallpox Eradication USAID WHO Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 162772 bytes image/jpeg Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mack, Tom (Owner); CDC Title A name given to the resource SEP TEAM – West Africa Description An account of the resource A color photograph of Bob Woodson (left) and Tom Mack (center) laying the groundwork for the Smallpox Eradication Program on an early trip to West Africa. Language A language of the resource No Linguistic Content https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/e4b666f214d116194b67269a1f294581.pdf e50d1f4e0a28a79bbe6d77de62a4a387 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 HIV/AIDS 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 CASE-CONTROL STUDY RESULTS Description An account of the resource National Case-Control Study of Kaposi's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis cariniiPneumonia in Homosexual Men: Part 2y Laboratory Results Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource MARTHA F. ROGERS, M.D.; DAVID M. MORENS, M.D.; JOHN A. STEWART, M.D.; ROSE M. KAMINSKI, M.S. Hyg.; THOMAS J. SPIRA, M.D.; PAUL M. FEORINO, Ph.D.; SANDRA A. LARSEN, Ph.D.; DONALD P. FRANCIS, M.D.; MARIANNA WILSON, M.S.; LEO KAUFMAN, Ph.D.; and THE TASK FORCE ON ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME; Atlanta, Georgia Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Annals of Internal Medicine. 1983;99:151-158. Published by the American College of Physicians Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource August 1, 1983 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource American College of Physicians https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/35c8696b4dd6f0f097dcaf1c630112ff.jpg f8baece4f8f23a894202c3887c5a2a74 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/d04627830a2d6e8669f59fda68ccc468.pdf b992c68df44827472101ef704d64308f 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 WITH RON WALDMAN Elisa: This is an interview with Ron Waldman on July 11th 2008 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia about his role in the smallpox eradication project. The interviewer is Elisa Coskey. With this interview we're hoping to capture for future generations the memories of participants and their families involved in eradicating smallpox. 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. The legal agreement you just signed says that you're donating the oral history to the U.S. Federal government and it will be in the public domain. For the record could you please state your full name and that you know you are being recorded? Ron: Ron Waldman. Yes, I know I'm being recorded. Elisa: Okay, thank you very much and thanks again for being here today. I just want to start with a few chronological questions and if you can describe for me briefly your childhood, your college education and what influenced you to become interested in public health in general. Ron: Well, my childhood was spent in New York City and then in Long Beach, New York where I graduated from high school. I went to college at the University of Rochester in upstate New York and then to Law School at the University of Chicago in nineteen sixty seven where I studied for one year until I left the U.S. during a period when many people my age then were leaving out of objections for the Vietnam war and I ended up in medical school at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. I can't honestly say that while there I had any exposure to public health at all and I really didn't know what I wanted to do in medicine with my medical degree when it was awarded to me somewhat surprisingly in nineteen seventy - in May of nineteen seventy five. Being a foreigner in Switzerland that time meant that without having the benefit any more of a student permit to live there I had to leave the country and I really didn't have much knowledge of what I was going to do. While there I had been coaching a high school baseball team and I was talking one day to my star pitcher from the team who was graduating from the international school in Geneva at the time. And we were talking about what we were going to do. I asked him what he was going to do and he said he was going to go out to Colorado to ski. And he asked me what I was going to do and I said I didn't have any idea, that I had just finished medical school at the university and I would probably end up doing something related to medicine. And he said, "Oh that's pretty interesting. You ought to meet my girlfriend." And I said, "Why?" "Well her dad works with the World Health Organization," and I said, "Okay well bring her to the next game." So, he came to the next game accompanied by his girlfriend and she said, "Well you ought to go up and see my dad," and her dad turned out to be D.A. Henderson. So I went up to meet with him and was long hair and all at the time ushered up to the smallpox offices where I don't remember exactly what happened but the upside of it was that they asked me if could leave for Bangladesh within the next few days and I said sure. And that's how I got my introduction to public health and to smallpox, which has been basically the beginning of career that's still going on. Elisa: So, quite an unanticipated chain of events. Ron: Very serendipitous event as had other previous events been so yeah, not the usual pathway into the program. I don't think so. I left as a basically - no basically I left for Bangladesh a few days after that meeting as a WHO volunteer so smallpox eradication was really my first job of a serious nature but I didn't get paid really any more than just the subsistence that WHO volunteers had at the time. I didn't know anyone who was working in public health. I didn't know what public health was. I'm sorry to say and maybe it doesn't reflect well on the very strong academic program at the University of Geneva medical school, but I hadn't really heard of smallpox and I am not entirely sure that I had heard of Bangladesh either but there I went. Elisa: Quite the adventure you were beginning. Can you tell me a little bit about your arrival there in Bangladesh and? Ron: Yeah. We went - I remember leaving Geneva and we were heading off for training in Delhi. I remember distinctly flying into Delhi and when they opened the door of the plane there was this rush of heat that I had never experienced before in my life and I knew I was somewhere different. We had a small orientation group there in India. I remember some of the people who were in that group with whom I'm still good friends. I think that orientation took about five days. Some people stayed in India, others were sent on to Bangladesh that's where the action was and I remember that first plane trip t o Bangladesh. I never thought I was going to land at all. It was May, the beginning of the monsoon season and the plane flew over Dhaka, tried to land, storms came in, the plane was rocking, it was just awful. For about an hour they kept circling around and trying to land. They couldn't and eventually the plane went back to Calcutta where we spent the night. This is all like in the fog of all of this newness happening to me. We were forced to spend the night in Calcutta, got out the next day. They took us to the airport, put us on a plane again and flew us off to Dhaka where this time we landed and we were greeted by Daniel Tarantola who was - I don't know exactly what but high up in the smallpox bureaucracy in Bangladesh - and taken into another orientation session that lasted about a week. And that's where I met all these acquaintances and many of which were with people that I'm still in regular contact with as I am with Danielle just now. At the end of that orientation where they were talking about things like imprest accounts and administrative matters and stuff that I really didn't understand and which I had frankly little interest, they shipped me off. I was young and there were few of us, a number of volunteers like myself. They shipped me off to the northeastern corner of the country, Syhlet district and there I went. I went from Syhlet - the smallpox base in Syhlet they shipped me off even further towards the Indian border to a upazila I think they're called now, a thana called Chhatak - a town called Chhatak where there were no roads. They had given me an outboard motor. I had no experience with motorboats but they gave an outdoor motor. I carried it up there on my back, found a boat, found a driver and started doing what they had instructed me to do which was to conduct surveillance activity. Elisa: You mentioned that you traveled further outside of your central village and had an outboard motor. Can you tell a little bit about what travel was like, did you have a team with you? Ron: I had one person with me basically, a driver who I had hired. I located up there. This was a place it was really far out in many ways but it was a place that had a big paper pulp factory that was run by an Eastern European country and when I got up there I didn't speak the language or anything. But I went over there and with a translator -- I had a translator -- just to find somebody who could drive me around in this motorboat. And we located a guy who just turned out to be fantastic and who literally saved my life a number of times. He'd been a freedom fighter during the Bangladeshi war of independence and those guys, Rakkhi Bahini they were called, were very highly respected by everyone. This was a guy of indeterminate age I would say. He had long flowing white beard but I don't think he was very old. He was probably in his forties or early fifties. And he attached himself to me and when we explained what I was there to do and what the program was about and became a very, very loyal, faithful, dedicated and incredibly competent colleague. We went around with fliers and posters and obviously had supplies of vaccine, bifurcated needles, everything else that we needed to control outbreaks of smallpox should we find them. We went around to - there were no roads literally. We only had the rivers to follow and then when enough rain had fallen and as I mentioned we were on the Indian border and when they created Bangladesh they just - the surveyors establishing the boundaries would walk and walk and walk and as soon as they took a step up, that's where they drew the border. So, Bangladesh was completely flat and there was no rock to build with. So, all of the stones for construction came from the Indian side of the border and they would carry them along the rivers in these long - I don't know - canoe like boats that they would load with rock until there was no free board whatsoever on the side of the boat. They were going with the top of their boats flushed with the waterline. Why not? There wasn't really any motorized traffic in these areas until I came along with my motorboat. So, I basically held their lives in - my driver did cause if we had created wake going past them with their boats filled with rock they were going down. So, the upshot of it was that basically I was king of the river or my driver was. So, it was really kind of we went everywhere. Like we went to market places, mosques, other gathering places, every little village we could find. After it had rained enough we could go straight as the crow flies. We didn't have to stay to the course of the rivers. Little rice paddies filled with water and the whole place was under water. I remember that we would just go straight from one point to another. Sometimes they had these little dykes between the rice paddies and sometimes we would hit our motor up against those dykes and we would break off what's called a shearing pin that keeps the propeller in place. So, we always had to have a hefty stock of shearing pins whenever we traveled. I remember that and I remember having to change them quite a number of times. As time went by I learned how to deal with the boat and I learnt enough of the language to get by so that on the weekends when we would go down to Syhlet to get a little R&amp;R; for a day or so with the other smallpox workers from the region, I used to take the boat down myself. I'd leave the driver up at home with his family and I used to go down probably about a three-hour ride with this little maybe thirty horsepower Yamaha engine that we had. So, I got to be pretty good with the motorboat in addition to smallpox. And you know by now many people must have explained what the deal was. We would ask if people - we had these recognition cards that the WHO had given us and we'd show them around and we would invite people to tell us if they had seen anybody with a rash that led them to suspect that this person might have smallpox. And then we would go out to that place, to the person's house. We'd try to get enough information to know where it was. And if indeed we identified the patient as a person who had smallpox we would institute containment activities which meant that we would isolate the patient in the home, hire guards from the village to make sure that no one could come in or out of the person's hut and we began vaccination routine. That's when we started hiring people and we would round up as many people as we could. They were usually younger kids who were interested; at least interested in earning the pittance that we were paying them. Six taka a day I remember really. It wasn't very much money and they would begin to - we would instruct them on how to vaccinate and they would begin vaccinating everybody. I don't remember exactly what the protocol was but it was maybe within the first day to vaccinate everybody within a one hundred meter radius of the index case and then within five days maybe three hundred meter radius or five hundred meter radius and eventually up to a kilometer around the case. For us it wasn't difficult at all because this was a pretty sparsely populated rural area and as I mentioned everything was water. So, the little villages if you could call them that, the clusters of homes were all on little islands basically that just were slightly elevated above the water. Maybe there'd be ten or twenty homes or something like that so we do 00:15:25 and vaccinate everybody and then just get back in the boat and go to the next line and get out and explain what we were doing there and vaccinate everybody. So it really wasn't for me all that many people. On the other hand we had a lot of smallpox. So, out of all the people that you will be talking to, I've seen as many cases of smallpox as anyone. This happened I think it was in March or April or maybe early May in Bangladesh the government knocked down the slums in the capital city of Dhaka and when they did that people fled back to their home villages and they transported diseases all over the country. During that - I know it's a big event that the WHO people really tried and CDC people really tried to get the government not to do this but the government was intent on knocking down these slums and they did and because then when smallpox was carried throughout the country that's when they had this huge resurgence. They had been doing quite well in bringing it under control but in that spring of nineteen seventy five there was a huge resurgence in the number of cases which is why coming full circle, they were so interested in taking anybody who would go basically and sending them out there. So, when I turned up on the basis of D A's daughter's recommendation at the offices in WHO they were really happy to see a warm body who was willing to go out there. They were throwing everything into trying to bring the epidemiological situation back under control. Elisa: Very interesting. Can you tell a little bit about your reception in some of these villages or as you called them like clusters of homes in combination with the social circumstances at the time? Were there ever any challenges that arose for you? Ron: Yeah, that's a terrific question and one that my answer will maybe be a little bit controversial and has been at other meetings of smallpox people. One of the reasons why the smallpox eradication effort in countries like Bangladesh was so successful was that those of us working in the program were fanatically committed to its success. I think that the tone was set by those people who were leaders and Bangladesh for us it was Stan Foster, Daniel Tarantola, a number of others, people from the CDC but we were going to get this job done. And I can't even tell you with tremendous accuracy what the reception was. Sometimes it was quite warm, we were always invited. I remember before we did anything when we arrived there and remember I was traveling with a guy who was incredibly respected in society there and who everyone knew. But we were always asked to take a seat; we were always offered green coconuts and the coconut water. We were offered tea always with - whatever little bit they had to offer guests we were always offered right off the bat. The hospitality was incredible. When it came to doing the job of if it meant isolating somebody in a home, if it meant vaccinating people who might not want to be vaccinated for one reason or another, the reception could become at times a little cooler. But it never really dissuaded us from getting the job done. So there were times when things were done even forcibly. If people tried to flee when it was their turn to be vaccinated because they were afraid of what it might be and it was never I don't think all together adequately explained to people or maybe it was and they didn't understand. They could be at times physically restrained and forcibly vaccinated. I have a very deep and abiding interest in human rights and in the relationship between communicable disease control and human rights. But I have to say that at least in my - from my personal experiences in Bangladesh there were times when one could be questioned about one's respect for other people's rights to have a particular intervention explained to them. And I know that this was the case in India as well and there was some papers and the literature to talk about this. There were times - I was very friendly because I had this big motorboat, not big but I had a motorboat, which was unusual for the area so the military forces would come by at times and you know just to see what I was up to because I had something that could be of value to them under certain circumstances. So, I was kind of friends with the military and people knew that and it was interesting. But we always got the job done and I really, really hope that we did it with the maximum amount of explaining to people what we were after and to the largest degree possible with their assent and their accord. Elisa: Okay. I'm really interested in hearing a little bit more about your relationship with your guide. It sounds like he was an incredible asset to your whole experience there and you mentioned really early in our conversation that there were a couple of times when he may have even saved your life. Could you discuss that a little bit more? Ron: Well sure. So, you know he was a Rakkhi Bahini. He was with the Bangladeshi Liberation Fighters during the war of separation from - of independence, Bangladesh independence from Pakistan, which was in 1971 and 1972. These are the guys who - they're the - that war was terrible as wars are in that part of the world, in any part of the world and the Pakistani forces would pillage villages, rape women and so on and so forth. And the major resistance was in the peripheral areas where these, I guess you could call them to a certain extent guerilla fighters who would do what they could to resist. Hit and run activities. Just you know, sabotage and whatever. These are guys who would when they were being chased they would stay underwater. The apocryphal stories were that they would stay underwater for 12 or 24 hours at a time breathing through a reed they would have plucked from the brush on the side of a river. So they were legendary and he happened to be a part of that and in the post independence days they could pretty much do what they wanted. And he was just a really upstanding guy who wanted to continue to provide service to the people and the country that he loved. And he was very, very happy to hook up with the smallpox eradication program. I don't remember if he had had relatives who had died of smallpox but everybody knew people who had smallpox. It was a fairly common disease in that part of the world. So yeah, I was really lucky that I had him because I'm sure I could have made some serious diplomatic faux pas and probably did and I'm sure I don't know of all the many times that he protected me actually. But I did say that there were times when he did save my life and that's true because as I said I didn't really know what I was doing with the motorboat at all and I would go and get in trouble with it a lot of the time. And I remember one time leaving - I lived in a guesthouse on one part of this town of Chhatak and he lived on the other side of the town along the river still. I remember I took the boat out one evening just to go for a little spin and it stalled. There was a big river we were on, the Surma River and I took the boat out and I didn't know what I was doing. And the motor stalled out and I got caught in a current and I was going down, down the river to places I didn't know. I didn't speak the language; I didn't know where I was going to end up or how I was going to get out of it. I just remember that as I was going down past where he lived I was waving my arms and everything and somehow he was there and he saw me. I don't know how. And he hopped into a canoe like thing and paddled out to the motorboat and got it started and took me home. It was dark by then I remember. I was a little scared but I remember him coming to the rescue. Elisa: Great story. Can you tell me anything about your relationships with other country counterparts and your relationship with other WHO team members, CDC team members? Ron: Yeah. In terms of the country counterparts I didn't have - in that iteration I later was transferred - actually maybe I was transferred because of this incident that I might recount now. So I did - I was up there for about five or six months in that part and then I was transferred down. We took - smallpox was over and I was assigned to an area that was on the Bay of Bengal so in the southern part of the country, Noakhali it was called. My relations with the Bangladeshi Ministry of Health officials who were up there in Chhatak my first posting were not so great. I remember - you know we worked a lot - a lot of people who have been working in the malaria program came over and were assigned to smallpox. And for the most part the ones I had to deal with were not - maybe they were malaria people but I remember there were some district medical officers. Remember this is my first job ever and I was - you know we were focused is what we wanted to do and that my impression is that as I remember it now is that I wasn't impressed with their dedication to their job. I thought that they were not working hard enough to get the job done. I thought that they could have been doing a lot more and basically I didn't have so much respect for their competence. Now I've been working in global health ever since then so for the past thirty or some odd years or more and I know a lot of things now that I should have known then about how much they were being paid, how they had to do other things to earn a living to support their families. I didn't have any of these things. I had never had a paying job and still didn't have a paying job. I didn't have a family. I had nothing but smallpox eradication. And I went in and I suspect I was probably an imperious, self-centered, uncaring foreigner who didn't know anything about the place where I was working. I didn't even have an appreciation for learning the culture or having an understanding of the history of the place. I was a young kid, brash, brazen and interested in only one thing which was getting the job done that I was there to do as quickly and as effectively as possible and I was probably pretty obnoxious. On the other hand there were things that in the way that I was treated there also they were pretty annoying and people will tell you Bangladeshis have this strange habit that I've really never seen any place else of staring and gathering around foreigners and staring at them and sometimes just poking. And just you know they don't have the same at least then or at least my perception then was that they didn't have same respect for individual space that we have. On top that I'm left handed and they eat with their hands and I ate with my left hand which wasn't a really cool thing to do in a society like that. I remember I had to go out to a restaurant in town. I always went to the same place every night to eat the small amount that there was to eat but people commented. I'd be trying to eat and people would be - you'd have a crowd around you cause they didn't see 00:29:04 standing there looking, staring at you or what you were doing. And I'd be eating and I'd be eating with the wrong hand and eventually the restaurant owner took pity on me and built a small little - put a curtain up in a corner of the restaurant and that would by my area where I could go and eat in peace. So it was tough. It was a lot of pressure on me. It was a strange environment, it was my first job and so on and so forth and it got at times a little lonely up there. I was on my own in terms of WHO team and it was tremendous. It was just a phenomenal learning experience that I tried to handle as well as possible. I'm very happy that we got the job done. I'm very happy to have had that experience and to have grown so much from it, to have learned from it and to have launched my career there and I've had a great career since then. So, that was good. In terms of other people from WHO there was another guy like me a young - I think he's going to be here this weekend, in the thana next door, much bigger thana. I had - most of us had a - I forget what the words that the administrative areas were called; you know the equivalent of a province or region or something. And most of the people were assigned to a region of a country that contained a number of districts. I had one district under my - in my area of supervision. It was a large district and it was so difficult to get around. But there was a guy in the one next-door called Sunamganj who had the same job as I did and we would get together occasionally. Not all that often cause it was probably an hour down the big river between us. An hour one way and an hour back the other way against the current. It's a lot. We did get together as I mentioned on weekends probably about eight or ten people. Steve Jones was the sort of overall supervisor of all of us working in that area and we would go down to his place in the center of Syhlet and meet up for a weekend. Elisa: Did you find it helpful to have a group of people that you could sort of commune with to share your experiences with who were also foreigners doing the same type of job and what sort of things did you do when you got together? Ron: Yeah. Yeah, I found it great. It was a good break from the field. I think we went every two weeks. It was a good break from the field. It was only a couple of days which was fine because after a day you wanted to get back to the field and back to work anyway. But it was a nice house and it had a roof. I remember we used to sit up on the roof and you know if somebody got their hands on a couple of cans of beer or a bottle of whisky or some marijuana or whatever it was we would have a nice little time and it was a good break. And then we'd go back and back to work. But we really only went down for the Dhaka very, very rarely maybe. Maybe I went in the whole time I was up there twice at the most except that in the middle of all this I had mentioned my relationship with the military. In the middle of all this the President of the country Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated by a military coup and it was basically a lock down every place. And they came because they knew where I was and took my boat because they needed it to get around. So that was a little scary too cause you know we communicated with the center by radio, walkie-talkie and communications were down, they took my boat. It was a little scary for a little while but I don't remember how eventually I got down to Dhaka but I know that during that period we were called back in and I know that I got there somehow so that was okay. Elisa: I'd like to talk a little bit about how your experiences in Bangladesh impacted the rest of your life and as you said it started you on a long career in public health. Ron: Yeah, it sure did. I mean I - while I was there obviously I met a lot of the people from here from the CDC who had gone out there. Some people were there for a long time like Stan and Steve Jones. They were doing - they stayed in smallpox for a while. Other people, a lot of people came through on a regular basis from the CDC. We used to call them 90-day wonders. Those of us who were the hippie volunteers in the field after a month or so you were a veteran and you knew what you were doing and you were totally experienced. And here came these new coming guys from the EIS or whatever and they were going to come out for three months where we had all made two year commitments or more. And we just, 'big hot shot docs from the U.S.' and we used to look down on them a lot. Try to make fun of them whenever we could so we called them ninety day wonders but I met a lot of them and asked them questions like you're asking me, "Why did you get into public health, what are you doing, do you like it?" and I liked a lot of them and they liked me. And before I left they asked if I would consider joining the EIS program and I said, "Yeah let me in. It sounds good." I'd finally found my calling. This is really wanted to do was the kind of stuff I was doing, the field work that I was doing in Bangladesh. Elisa: Sure. I was just asking about how your experiences in Bangladesh influenced your subsequent career in public health? Ron: So, I met a lot of people from the CDC and I liked them, they liked me and before I left they asked if I would consider joining the EIS. I said sure but I had remembered I didn't have any internship. I had just graduated from medical school and had my degree. So, it was a requirement that you had to do an internship so eventually when I left smallpox, I guess it was in seventy seven, I went back to the States where I hadn't been in some time, almost ten years and I did an internship. And then I liked that so I stayed another year and I started doing a residency in internal medicine. But then I started not liking it so much but what I did was I had called D.A. Henderson. I went Johns Hopkins after having contacted D.A. again and I got my Masters in Public Health degree. They had then a preventive medicine program and the second year of their preventive medicine program that I was in they would place the students with state and county health departments and things like that. So, I remember that the chief resident, the head of that residency program asked me, "Well Ron for your practicum how would you like to go work with the EIS officer in Maryland?" And that sort of triggered my memories of EIS. I was a student. I was paying them for the privilege and here they wanted me to go and work alongside of whoever the EIS officer was who was making what was a not bad salary. So, I basically said, "Listen that reminds me. I don't want to work with EIS officer I can be the EIS officer." And I applied to the EIS that year and got in and there you have it. I was assigned to the state of Michigan to do my EIS and that time I was one of the few people in the EIS class that had substantial overseas - international experience, my Bangladesh experience but I don't know if they counted my Switzerland experience or not I don't know. But early on they asked me if I wanted to go and work in the Cambodian crisis. The genocide from Cambodia had resulted in large numbers of people fleeing to Thailand and they asked if I would head a team from CDC to - no they asked if I would work as a epidemiologist on a team of people going out there and for a number of reasons I didn't want to do that so I didn't go. I was involved in other stuff in Michigan actually but a few months there was a crisis, a refugee crisis in Somalia and they asked me again. The CDC had very good ties with Somalia because it was the last country that had smallpox and there was a guy there in particular named Abullahi Deria who had been instrumental in the Somalia effort to control smallpox and he had friends -- Bill Fagee notably -- at the CDC. And they asked me if I would head a team going out to Somalia. And by that time I had things in Michigan under better control and I was happy to do that. So, I went out to Somalia for about three months we organized things with the ministry of health. Now I really had the benefit of much more experience than I did the first time I had done this and we did a pretty darn good job. Some people came over who I met who were excellent. We had a number of EIS officers and we did a really good job there organizing what was called the refugee health unit at the ministry of health in Somalia. And was actually the first time that we were able to undertake a series of fairly decent epidemiological studies that enabled us to define and describe the kinds of problems that refugees face when they are settled in refugee camps as at that time was so often the case. With other colleagues here and people that we brought in here afterwards we really kind of developed the epidemiology of refugee health and that's - did that for a long time. After EIS I'd gone to Somalia two or three times 00:40:14 EIS. Then there was - I applied for a position here in what was called the international health program office and I was accepted into that and I came down to Atlanta to work. But there was a reduction in force in the public health service so they shipped me out to Somalia again and I was there for another six months and we developed primary health care programs and so on and so forth. But the point is that I basically stayed connected to the CDC here for about five years in the international health program office. Eventually I became a division director in that office. Stan Foster was - there were three divisions. Stan Foster was the other division director on the country support side and I was the head of the technical support division. We were implementing a program called Combating Childhood Communicable Diseases in fourteen African countries, a programs funded by USAID so I was traveling all over the place doing a variety of stuff. Before taking the division director job I had been posted as an epidemiologist in Africa so I was in Abidjan, Ivory Coast for three years for the CDC as a regional epidemiologist in the context of this combating childhood communicable diseases or Triple C D Program as it was called. Interestingly there were three of us in Africa, three regional epidemiologists. Myself, there were two people during that time in then Zaire and then in Malawi David Hamen was posted who had also been in smallpox in India in west Bengal at the same time that I had been in Bangladesh. So we were pretty close friends and we still are to this day. After that I stayed here until about - I don't know - eighty eight, eighty nine, something like that and then I moved to Geneva to WHO and became eventually the head of cholera program there but continued doing refugee work. So, I served in a - I was asked to coordinate humanitarian assistance for CDC. I was still at CDC. During the Gulf War I was in northern Iraq and Turkey and then continued to work in these humanitarian crises. I was seconded by CDC to the UN to coordinate infectious disease control policy in Zaire after the Rwanda genocide in Goma and just continued on. And I had - eventually I built up a reputation here of getting very creative assignments and in nineteen ninety four still on a CDC billet, I was actually assigned to the private sector to a company called John Snow Incorporated that is a contractor to USAID. And they had a very large child health program, a hundred and twenty five million dollar program called BASICS and I was the technical director of that for a while. And then still on a CDC billet I did that for about five years and then I was asked to start this program at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia. It was called the - it is called still the program on forced migration and health. And then I eventually retired from CDC although I'm still - well now I'm working for USAID on pandemic preparedness. So yeah that initial experience not only exposed me to public health but also exposed me to the CDC where I've spent the better part of my career doing different things all directly involved in global health. And so I'm really grateful to have had that experience because while I was in medical school what I was entertaining most was becoming a thoracic surgeon which sort of would have taken me in a different direction all together. Elisa: A very different direction. Ron: Yeah. Elisa: Well, thank you so much for sharing your experience. It sounds like experience with smallpox in Bangladesh certainly started off a very long and rewarding career in public health. And in closing I just want to ask if there is anything else you would like to share, anything I didn't touch on that you would like to add to our discussion? Ron: I guess the only thing that I would say in regards to smallpox eradication, it's really taught me a lot about programming and I think that different people have different thoughts about not so much smallpox eradication which everyone accepts has having been an inordinately successful program. But you know it spawned a number of other programs I think we need to learn from the smallpox experience both the things that were good about it but also the potential pitfalls that a program like this created because it really was a big employment industry if you will, smallpox. It went in and it really took control of a lot of ministries of health in a lot of poor and developing countries. And all of the other programs that were going on in a country like Bangladesh or like India, I won't say all I don't want to exaggerate, but this really cut the legs out from a lot of other programs because we took the personnel, we had the resources, we had the action and we really set the agenda in a lot of these countries. And I think we have to learn from that because from smallpox you've had a lot of other things happening. One thing led to obviously the guinea worm eradication program, the polio eradication programs, soon there will be a measles eradication program. And I think we have to learn that the most important thing that's come out of my experiences and my career for me is that people have a right to access health care for whatever their needs might be. And we have to make sure when we're undertaking these very singularly focused programs that we're doing it in a way that strengthens rather than weakens health systems in poorer countries where people can still go to a public health facility near where they live and make claims on that facility to meet their current health needs. Not everybody is going to require smallpox services. We should make sure that when these other programs are being implemented and they're all good programs, that they're not cutting the legs out from under malaria control programs or diarrhea control programs or pneumonia programs or whatever else it might be. Those things that are so important to people's health and their ability to survive and towards meeting the overarching millennium development goals that have been set for all of us working in public health. Elisa: Okay. Thank you again for sharing with us and we appreciate it. Ron: Thanks. </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bi_KyDH9Qks" 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 2008-07-11 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/16rv5 emory:16rv5 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 10340160000 bytes video/x-dv Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource McNatt, Kellie (Interviewer); Emory; Student Waldman, Ronald (Interviewee); WHO; Epidemiologist Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Centers for Disease Control Reunion of Southeast Asia and East Africa Smallpox Workers (2008 : Atlanta, Georgia) Title A name given to the resource WALDMAN, RONALD J. Description An account of the resource Dr. Ron Waldman describes experiences in the Peace Corps working with the Smallpox Eradication Program in Bangladesh during 1974-1975 Subject The topic of the resource Language A language of the resource English