5 12 68 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/f511eaf351fca33dd931d73b53f72ca3.jpg bc48be88f6f273f40238ff6efd93d765 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/29a432a70495ed1beb0b629e39dad491.pdf 7d32ae7f525a12ef5444e0be9e3c968b 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 Audio File: Carolyn Olsen Audio File Transcribed: January 22, 2009 Interviewer: This is an interview with Carolyn Olsen on July 11th two thousand and eight at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia about her role in the smallpox eradication campaign. The interviewer is Melissa McSwegan. With this interview we are 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 signed says that you are donating you're donating your 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. Interviewee: My name is Carolyn Hardy Olsen and I know I am being recorded. Interviewer: Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, so would you please briefly describe your childhood and you education and so on and what led you into work or participating in public health campaigns? Interviewee: I grew up in Wyoming and after doing all my schooling in Cheyenne Wyoming I went to the University of Wyoming where I graduated as civil engineer. And so I was working in Los Angeles when I met Dennis and shortly after we were married. We went to Africa and we enjoyed our three years in Liberia then we came back and again I worked as an engineer. And we were in Springfield Illinois when he went to (Bagapur) for three months and during that time I was working for the environmental protection agency and also getting my masters degree in environmental engineering. So, when he went to India I said I can't go right now I have to finish my masters degree. So, he sold the house out from under me and so I house sat that summer while I finished my degree but he knew I was coming to India cause I didn't have any place to live. And so I finished my masters degree and then I arrived in India and he met me in Delhi and it was pretty bad. And so after two days he put me on a train and we went off to Lucknow and he said, "I didn't decorate the apartment because I thought you could do it. And I sat there and all the wire was on the outside, the refrigerator was in the living room. It was really basic and I thought, "Oh my goodness." And so he said, "I've got to work now," and when he came back he said, "I've got to go the field tomorrow," and he wanted to go so we went off for a ten day field trip and when you go on a field trip you stay in very interesting places. Probably the best items that we took to India were our sleeping bags cause we were staying - they call them dock bungalows and they were usually about fifteen cents for a place to stay and breakfast and it wasn't worth it. Interviewer: Oh, right. Interviewee: They were really very basic and if we had water we would - if we had hot water we were very lucky but usually we had water. Then when we came back from that first trip Lucknow looked great then about a couple weeks later I used to have to fly or take the train into Delhi to get supplies. And like Dennis said it was like going to Europe. I mean Delhi looked first class after being in the field. Interviewer: Your perspective changed quite a bit during that time. Interviewee: Yes. Interviewer: How did you - you mentioned that you went on a - on field visits with your husband when he was working with the smallpox campaign. Did you play any particular role during these trips? Interviewee: Well, many of the villages were very rural and so I would usually walk along and because many times by having a woman with him the women were more comfortable but also I found that it's very interesting. Sometimes they have [inaudible 04.23] these different things in the village. I'll tell you one of the most interesting days though, in India women always have their legs covered and usually their arms. So I used to wear Levis and a kurta and I had very long blonde hair at that time and often wore it in a pigtail or pulled back. And on one occasion we came to this village way out in the middle of nowhere and I was reading a book that was really interesting so I said I'm not going into the village, I'll just stay here in the jeep. And so all the children come and they looked at me then they all ran away. And then all the ladies came and they got in a nice little line and usually people will go 'Namaste' but if you're very important it's 'Namaskar'. And the ladies were all giving me the 'Namaskar' and then they would chat away in Hindi. Well, the driver was just howling. I mean he was over by the - just holding his sides. The children had told the women that Indira Gandhi had come to the village so they were all telling me - and all the men were in the field because they were farmers and so probably in some village in India there is the [inaudible 05.41] of the day Indira Gandhi came to visit. But in general we would always go to the different health units and many times the Indian doctor was somebody who was either trained in Delhi or Bombay, now called Mumbai, and they were so glad to see somebody who spoke English. I mean they would get out their wedding pictures. These poor young ladies had arranged marriages and now they're in a village and they were used to living in a big city and so often times we had dinner with them. I mean it was a very - they were very hospitable and we just had a very interesting time in our field visits. Again we would go to many different health units during a day tracking down things and making sure their records were right. The sanitary facilities, again being an environmental engineer were not always that great and so you always had to watch your intake during the day. And so everybody wanted to give you tea and I didn't know at first how to say no and then I found out that, again it was Rujinder Singh our - Dennis' PMA who told me, "Tell them you're fasting." So I would say, "Oh thank you but I'm fasting today," and they would say, "Why?" And I say, "Oh I'm fasting for the health of my husband and the success of the smallpox program," and they would think I was just this wonderful person and then two health units further I would have a cup of tea again. But again you were in an environment that was very different than what most people especially during the hot months it was like a hundred and twenty degrees and you couldn't roll down the windows in the jeep because the wind coming through. And one day our driver took a shortcut so we got lost and we ended up stopping in a village where they went in, took the straw out and got us a piece of ice out of the ground which we put in a bucket and bought about twenty four Coca Cola. And we would get towels wet, put them on our head and it was just a interesting day, I mean very trying on us. Interviewer: And did you have the opportunity to apply your engineering and engineering training while you were living there? Interviewee: Not really. Again sometime there would be water questions and - but it really didn't lend itself to get involved. I was able to do that more when I was in Liberia. I taught sanitation workers how to do mapping and different things but again we were - actually we were moving quite a bit when we were in India. Interviewer: Describe a bit your relationship with the host country counterparts or the people you were interacting with on a day to day basis. How did that work? Interviewee: Being a woman in India is different. Our living arrangement was quite nice in that we lived upstairs in what they called (vasadi) of the Dases. And Mrs. Das was actually the president of the girls school next door, Isabel Thornbird College which is a prestigious college for Lucknow. And Mr. Das had been the police chief for the whole state and so we were included in that part. So there I felt very comfortable being a woman but when we were in the field it was - or when you were alone you always felt like, especially young boys between like fifteen and twenty three, they were very aggressive and so you would always like to make sure that you were - and as a result the PMA and the driver and everybody were always very protective of me. And being a professional person I was not used to having to have to kind of being protected. And then later on when we moved to Delhi it was a matter of having the taxi driver watch you while you went into the market. And it wasn't that you felt security, I mean it was just that they wanted to touch your hair or something. One time - oh, I had - I was having a strange pain and my fingers were starting to go numb and so I went to a doctor in Delhi and they said that I have Hobo's Disease. It was my arm from riding in the jeep I would have my arm up and it was pinching a nerve. And he says, "I think we should X-ray you." So I went in and the doctor came in and he started laughing because the paramedic had put my hair, my blonde hair so it was like a halo while I was laying there. But in general you just go with the flow of things. It was quite interesting. Interviewer: What were some of the biggest challenges to living in India? Interviewee: Food actually was kind of a challenge. We were - when we were in the field we were usually vegetarians because you didn't know the last time somebody who may have come through and eaten meat so you didn't know how old the meat that was in the restaurant. And we ate at the truck stops along the way and so we would always have to ask them to put the samosas back in or put new samosas into the hot oil so everything we ate was hot. The embassy doctor used to just be amazed because we would not get ill but we didn't eat fresh vegetables unless we were home and they were peeled even if we went to a very nice hotel or a nice buffet and we had a lot of soup and a lot of things but also we had a cook. He had a reputation. He had worked for Dr. Francis and Dr. McGinnis and everybody knew that Iddu was just a wonderful cook and so Iddu was an old man, I mean now he is probably forty but he seemed like an old man to us at that time. And he became ill and they gave him streptomycin which caused inner ear damage and so he was having a hard time walking and so then I would pay for a rickshaw to bring him right up to the door and then I had him bring his daughter who had had smallpox so it was really quite appropriate. She was blind in one eye and had pox - to help him so that he could his work. And one day - she would marketing, he would do the cooking most of the time. One day I am cooking, he is sitting there with his feet up, she is outside drinking tea and I'm thinking, "And I have servants," you know. But during that same period of time Iddu got more sick and so about every six weeks or so we would have this regional meeting and all of the epidemiologists would come in and the international epidemiologists would come for lunch and then the Indian and the international ones would all come for dinner which would be about a hundred people. So, we would have usually about twelve to fifteen for lunch and I had Sabra who would help but Iddu was gone so it was up to me. So I thought, "Well what," - so for lunch we had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Kool-Aid for the international group and then for the other people I did manage to find some things that were almost ready made, you add two vegetables and you became, you know. And I thought okay this is adequate. Well, the next month as we're going around to the different epidemiologists to see how things were going and everything, all the international ones says, "Boy I hope you have the same lunch next time we're here. That was the best thing. I go to bed at night dreaming of that peanut butter and jelly sandwich." And then the Indian doctors, and Indian doctors actually had a harder time finding food because their wives had taken care of their food in their houses and rarely did they eat out. And in India you have to sort your rice and you know all those different things. Well, a couple of them asked for my recipe for the different curries I had made that night and I didn't have the heart to tell them that I had gone to the store and bought a box of something that I put in it. So I kept on like don't, [inaudible 15.21] the recipe you know, but I had an enjoyable time. It was a challenge and you never quite knew what the day was going to bring. Interviewer: Were you able at some point to decorate your apartment? You had mentioned your apartment had all the wires on the outside and did it eventually become more... Interviewee: Well, it actually started looking pretty good. Interviewer: Okay. Interviewee: I mean, we had fluorescent lights and definitely - but during - well, electricity was not always available and so sometimes you would have company or somebody and all of a sudden all the power would go out. And before the game Trivia Pursuit, we used to play a game that you would give the person the almanac and the flashlight and they would ask the other people questions. So that was our entertainment on that but when we were in the field sometimes if you didn't have power we would go to the movie because the Hindi movies are four hours long, they usually have fans or if they are upscale they have air conditioning and they have their own generators. So we used to go to a lot of Hindi movies when we were traveling and it was - like I said the heat was a challenge when you have a hundred and twenty degrees. Then the cold was a challenge because you had fifteen foot ceilings and no heat and so if you invited people over for dinner you would put the heater under the table and everybody would sit there in their coats and you would usually have soup or something hot. But other than that I mean it was probably the most grueling experience I have. I mean if you look at going to school, going to college, going to India is just straight up. I mean it's like they say you see the poorest, you see the richest. You are the hottest, you are the coldest. Everything is a dichotomy and the people there were just absolutely very hospitable and very, very nice. They were you know again I would say kind of shy but some of the doctors that we met especially the Indian doctors that were in charge of different areas were very, very nice. And this apartment that we had since they would come to visit us, they would see what we lived in so then they felt like they could invite us to their home so whenever we went to Delhi we would be invited to some of the doctors' houses. And probably one of the best invitations we ever had was Dr. Hakoli. While we were there they had the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad which happens I think every fifteen years and it's on the river banks of the River Ganges. And on a busy day there's about probably ten to fifteen million people come and we were invited to come and stay in one of the tents for a minor bathing day so there was only about five million people there. And so the Jumna, the Sangam and the Ganges all meet there and everybody goes to bathe and they have - they pray to the Sadhus. And the first night we arrived there was this chanting so I asked Mrs. Hakoli, I said, "Do they pray all night?" cause it sounds like the Hare Krishna chant. And she said, "Pray?" And I said yes and she said, "Oh! No they're listing hundreds of women who were lost today." And it was a tradition that when you went back to your village you stopped at lost and found to see if anybody from your village had come and gotten lost to take them back. And you would see these ladies with their saris tied together and some young son taking all their aunties to this festival. So it was very, very interesting. Interviewer: What were some of the biggest differences between India in Liberia in comparing your two experiences? Interviewee: Well, I worked in Liberia so I was working as a school teacher there and teaching math and in India I felt like my role was more to support my husband and then there were a lot of social functions like when the international group came again we hosted at our house. When we lived in Delhi and probably - well the type of people we met in India were very different even from the international side cause the Soviet Union was also - had provided quite a few epidemiologists and doctors for the program. And so we not only had Russians but we also had people from Chezkslovakia and a lot of Eastern European countries. And it was an education in social morays and also in how different countries looked at the Soviet Union and how when they socialized and when we socialized it was very different. Cause like if we were to go to a party it was put on by Dr. Codokevich or something as opposed to when we had a party we would look around and find out who else had a servant who would be the bartender and somebody else. So we had all Indian staff working the party. When we went to a Soviet party it was people from the embassy. I mean there were all kinds of ladies and other people that were Russian that were - you weren't uncomfortable but you knew it was very, very different. Interviewer: How did your time abroad particularly in India and Liberia with the smallpox program, how did that affect your career and your life afterwards? Interviewee: Well, on a I guess - India is such - I mean it's just there's so much energy and so much to do and so much to see that I just suddenly felt like I either had to write a book or do something and instead I started painting and in about six months I painted sixty some pictures all Indian. And in India you can do anything so I had a one woman show and sold my paintings and it was really, it was quite interesting. And one of the highlights was that Dr. Sensor actually purchased the first painting I ever painted which was of a train station and gave it to Dr. Fergie. And so my claim to fame was that one of my paintings was in the Carter Center for a while but on a professional side it really brought home the need for clean water. And my profession as it moved forward I was commissioner of water and pollution control for the city of Atlanta and I was very involved in a lot of water and waste water activities. I also then became the president of a non profit which is called Water for People and it gives you a real empathy for how important clean water and drinking water is because when we were in the field in order to have clean water we used to carry - the old milk buckets there are kind of made of aluminum and about this tall. And each night we would fill our jug up with water, put the immersion heater in, boil our water and put it in a - so we never had cold water but we had clean water. And with all the disease and the different things you just realize that water is probably one of the most important parts of our existence. Interviewer: Well, do you have any other stories or anecdotes that you would like to share with us? Any memorable moments from your time there? Interviewee: Oh, I must say that one of the - when we moved to Delhi I didn't get to go in the field anymore so I became a professional traveler and as a result anybody going anywhere I would go. And I was able to go up to an area close to the Nepali border which was called Tiger Haven where they would bring tiger - small tigers back from London and get them back into the wild. And they would put you up in a cage and let you watch the animals which was very interesting. Another time I went with some missionaries and we took a train ride on a no class train and it was a twenty four hour ride down to New Bombay and I was with some Swedish people and it was very, very interesting cause we used to travel by train but we used to travel at least first class something which wasn't that great. But this was - I think it cost me ten dollars to take a twenty four hour trip one return. And on one train we were in a car and the rest was freight and all of a sudden there was a band and it came through playing and it then got off the train. We come to find out they were on top and that's where - also that's where they would make tea and they would lean down over and sell you tea into the compartment but they riding up on top. And the last trip that I took that was very interesting was some people from the embassy were going to go from Delhi to Kabul, Afghanistan. So we went through Pakistan and through the Khyber Pass and into Afghanistan. And that was all in the seventies so that was before the Russians came and I just feel very sad when I see what has happened to Afghanistan. I don't know if you've read it or not but Kite Runner when it described at the beginning is the kind of Afghanistan that I had seen and I also had empathy for Afghanistan cause when I went to University of Wyoming, University of Afghanistan, University of Wyoming were sister colleges so I had met Afghans then also. But other than being a world traveler I think that was pretty much a very positive experience and again I'm sure it changed my life. I mean it just gave me a whole different way of looking at the world and from a South East Asian standpoint but also with all the different cultures that we met through the program. Interviewer: Well, thank you for sharing your story. Interviewee: Okay. </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vfecYsSMtAs" 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 2008-07-12 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/16rc7 emory:16rc7 Subject The topic of the resource CDC Smallpox Smallpox India Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 5847600000 bytes video/x-dv Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Olsen, Carolyn (Interviewee) McSwegin, Melissa (Author) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Centers for Disease Control Title A name given to the resource OLSEN, CAROLYN Description An account of the resource Carolyn Olsen, wife of Operations Officer Dennis Olsen, discusses life in India and in Liberia, during the Smallpox Eradication Program. Language A language of the resource English https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/9e73adb0276dae8e3e81b079dded3264.jpg a6b7596f97213fa0478af4a827dbca76 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/593067580a4e333a354d709d49ccd453.pdf c49df0c586f37185344bfce41561d04a 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 Audio File: Stan Music Audio File Transcribed: January 29, 2009 Interviewer: This is an interview with Stan Music on July 11th, 2008 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia about his role in the smallpox eradication campaign. The interviewer is Melissa McSwegan. With this interview we are 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 signed says that you are donating the oral history to the U.S. Federal government and it will be in the public domain. So for the record could you please state your full name and that you know you are being recorded. Interviewee: My name is Stanley Music and I know that I'm being recorded. Interviewer: Thank you. To start out with can you talk a bit about how your education and upbringing led you to work in the health field? Interviewee: Yeah. My father was an immigrant although he came to this country at a very early age. He was the oldest of five or six children and when his father died he was still a teenager and he had to quickly abandon any of his hopes at a higher education and start earning a living for his family. As a result of that he always encouraged both his sons -- me and my brother -- to become a professional man whatever that meant to him but he wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or something professional and not have the financial worries that he had pretty much all of his life. Interviewer: And so then once you did - begun working in health how did you get involved with the smallpox campaign? Interviewee: Well I went to - I got accepted to two medical schools one of which was in the same city in which I lived and the other was an hour away and would require that I be in residence away from home which opportunity I jumped at because I had been to college in the same city in which I lived. So I went to University of Maryland, medical school and fell under the influence of professor of medicine Ted Woodward who was quite well known in international infectious disease circles. Because I fit his profile of whatever he was looking for, during my junior year summer between third year and fourth year of medical school he sent me as a research assistant to Pakistan. And I saw an incredible variety of infectious diseases, human rabies, smallpox, cholera and a few others that made a deep and lasting impression on me and probably set my values for somebody who wanted to help make a difference in diseases of poverty in tropical areas and generally trying to bring the benefits of twentieth century medicine to a population that was living in hundreds of earlier times in effect. Interviewer: So, when you first began working with the smallpox campaign what was your role? Interviewee: Oh. We have skipped an awful lot of history then. So I was very much interested in infectious disease, internal medicine and actually specialized in infectious disease but couldn't quite see myself as an academic fighting for grants etcetera. So I followed a friend of mine, Mike Greg down to CDC and paid him a visit where he was part of the EIS program and editing the MMWR and got very interested in a career in the public health service in epidemiology. And the following year I applied to the EIS - excuse me - and was accepted and because of my Pakistan experience when I was an EIS officer and Pakistan and - West Pakistan and East Pakistan had a falling out and East Pakistan wanted to become an independent country called Bangladesh. I was part of the team that was sent by CDC to work in Bangladesh on a nutrition survey designed to make sure that the food that was in the country was given on a priority basis to the areas that needed it the most. That experience in turn led me to learn Bengali and that's why Stan Foster was very interested in recruiting me to the Bangladesh program because I had been to the country before and I spoke enough of the language to get around on my own. So that kind of set the stage for my smallpox involvement. I protested mightily when he asked me to join because I had just acquired admission and a full federal scholarship to University of London to get an MPH equivalent degree. But he agreed that if I gave him two years of smallpox eradication that he would see to it that I continued on in my academic studies before joining CDC permanently as a staff member and he was good to his word as was I. Interviewer: So tell me a little bit about the working relationships you had with your counterparts on the ground and what were the successes and failures you had with that. Interviewee: Well, counterpart was I think in many ways an exaggeration because they really had no clue as to what was expected and what was going to be done. We ended up actually setting up a whole parallel system of employment. We used Ministry of Health personnel to be sure but by giving them - by basically doubling their salaries and giving them access to motorbikes and Land Rovers and other transportation we elevated their status and they became very loyal to us. They became reliable surveillance partners who could go out on a schedule and be in a village market on a given day at a given time and advertise about the smallpox program and get information about whether there was any smallpox showing pictures of kids with smallpox and asking if they knew of anyone. But we set up a whole parallel system. The government of Bangladesh was very good at acquiescing to our stated and carefully thought out -- most of the times -- needs but they really weren't partners in the delivery of the services. They just stood aside and let us do our things mostly. Interviewer: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced on the work on the ground? Interviewee: Well, one of the biggest challenges was getting people to do what they were supposed to do. They weren't used to being inspected. They weren't used to being challenged, they weren't used to having somebody count the number of vaccines vials and then three weeks later come back and ask how many people had been vaccinated and then go back and count the vaccine vials again and see if things actually jived. I learnt very early that the Bengali intellect is quite well formed and they know for example that there are exceptions to every rule. So when I said you know if you find a smallpox case the whole village is quarantined and you vaccinate everyone, but if I then did an inspection when they said everyone had been vaccinated, they would - I would discover a guy dying of TB or congestive heart failure or something lying off in a corner of a hut, and he had been exempted from vaccination. But I said there are no exemptions and they said every rule has exemptions and I said okay, thought about for a while and then I said, "Okay. We are now going to vaccinate everybody with one exception. We will vaccinate no dead persons." And they laughed but they understood and then I had no problems. So it was a matter of understanding the culture, understanding their attitudes and the challenge then of translating my desires into something that they could follow and give me results that I was looking for. Another big challenge was these seasonal fairs that pulled people in from many, many miles away. They were a source of revenue to the district commissioners who got a piece of the commercial action but when I found that a particular fair was actually a disseminating source of smallpox because people who were infectious were coming, mingling with people who were still susceptible who then spread out and returned to their villages, I had a big problem. And I had to - people who were earning the money threatened me because I was going to report this. In the end I went to Dhaka and informed my superiors about it but basically got no support until D.A. arrived from Geneva, listened to my tale of woe and did his little magic with the political heads of the health department and WHO and then we managed to put vaccinators into the fair areas and stop the transmission. So there were challenges all the time. Another challenge we had was a lack of petrol in the area that I was designed to cover. So we had Land Rovers and we had jeeps and we had motorbikes but we couldn't run them because we didn't have any fuel and there was no way to get any fuel. But we ended up doing something quite inspired, quite illegal and quite dangerous. We found a train siding run by the army with cars full of petrol. We ended up one night unpinning the connection to the last car, rolling it a couple of miles down the track and siphoning out all the gasoline and finding ways to store it and returning the car under the cover of darkness back to the train as if nothing had happened only it was now largely empty instead of being full. But we needed the petrol to make our surveillance rounds and to keep pressure on this disease to stop it from spreading. So, yes there were challenges every day of many, many kinds. Interviewer: Tell me a little bit more about life in Bangladesh from a cultural perspective. Not so much just about the work but what was it like living in Bangladesh? Interviewee: Ha. It meant when the sun went down the lights went out. It meant learning to be patient, it meant learning to enjoy the simple things like a home cooked meal. There were a mixture of Muslims and Hindus and a few Christians and a few non believers of every variety. There were some people of the old ruling class under the days of the Maharaja who still lived in crumbling palaces but it was a wonderful education and at night there was nothing to do but talk. There was no radio or television or anything although I did have a little portable shortwave but the culture was rich, the people were wonderfully talkative. The oral traditions were great and I learnt a lot about the people and their culture, their habits, their food, their clothing, their rituals and the way that they accepted life. And although they had by my standards a very primitive existence, they actually enjoyed their lives I thought to a much greater extent even with all the poverty and the disease and the premature mortality and the excess morbidity to a greater extent and with more relish than I could recall from the United States. Interviewer: As you were working with the smallpox campaign, was there a particular point where you knew that smallpox could be eradicated and would be eradicated? Interviewee: Well, actually no. I had the belief that it could be because I understood the epidemiology and nothing in my experience had given any reason to believe that my understanding was different than reality but every day in Bangladesh ten thousand - that was the birth rate - ten thousand new susceptible would be born. So even if as in my dreams we could fly B-52 bombers wing tip to wing tip over the country spraying vaccine so that everybody who took a breath would be vaccinated, the very next day we would have ten thousand new susceptible. And I knew that just vaccinating, trying to vaccinate and keep a population fully vaccinated wasn't going to work. What we needed was an epidemiologically oriented program that Bill Fergie designed and clearly when we were working efficiently with good surveillance and good follow up, good containment, good ring vaccination, good quarantine, we stopped the spread cold and it worked every time. So I knew that once we had it all together it was going to happen very quickly and it did. Interviewer: Now that you have thirty some years of perspective on this campaign is there anything you would have done differently? Interviewee: No, I don't think there was actually. I think it was a treasure of an experience, it shaped my life and my career and my attitudes, my values. I thought that smallpox was just the beginning, that we would then march on to measles and all the other vaccine preventable diseases. After all we had the surveillance organized, we had the trained staff, we had people in place, all we had to do was implement it but that was not going to be. But my generation of CDC epidemiologists were always somehow more empowered and more aggressively public health oriented than our colleagues who didn't have this experience. Interviewer: What are the most important lessons that you learned from smallpox that you then applied to other areas of your career after the campaign finished? Interviewee: Well, to a certain degree smallpox was about breaking the rules or interpreting the rules with flexibility bordering on breaking the rules because nobody sitting back at a desk could figure out what was really going on in the field. If you went to the field you learned about the fairs that were spreading smallpox, you learned about the people not being vaccinated because they had some other illness and etcetera. So smallpox taught me to break the rules if I was going to be successful, if I was going to be carrying out the disease reduction, following through on the results of an investigation. But you can't operate that way in the civilized world and in modern European or in America. So I had to change the way that Bangladesh had taught me and learn how to be patient, learn how to educate, learn how to involve the public and not be the kind of imperialistic dictator that solved the smallpox problem but was not going to cut the mustard in the real world after that. Interviewer: And how did the overall experience impact your life? Interviewee: Well it made me a public health believer because I had a monster success under my belt. They gave me a quarter of Bangladesh, twenty five million people then, five districts, a suitcase full of money and some vaccine and some bifurcated needles and said go do it. And I had a driver and we did it. It was amazing and it filled me with a desire to have a full public health career and to carry out those initial dreams that I had when I was but a medical student wanting to bring those people up to the twentieth century in terms of their morbidity, mortality and infant child mortality experience. Interviewer: Did you continue working in infectious diseases? Interviewee: Well I continued working in epidemiology but I came back to CDC and worked with Lyle Conrad in supervising EIS officers that were assigned to state and local health departments. I kept my hand in international consultation and did a few WHO and USAID consultancies. I used the time to understand a lot about other countries and eventually was recruited to the global EIS by Phil Brockman and then when he retired I was named his successor and I put programs in Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Philippines, Peru, Italy and Australia. And said no to a couple of very big countries to the disappointment of my boss because those countries weren't ready and they weren't going to participate but that was India and Egypt which have since changed and there are now cooperative programs with those countries. But I used that, that was - that helped define me. Interviewer: Can you tell us one - one of the most memorable moments you have of your time in Bangladesh? Something that happened, an event that happened, something that you remember and think back on. Interviewee: Yeah, I think I can. I don't think that there are very many people who know this story. There was a famine in Bangladesh at that time, at least in my area. There was a - they had two or three rice crops a year depending on how much water there was and the physical geography of individual areas. And a rice crop had failed so there was quite a bit of [inaudible 24.14] starvation and it was getting hard to hire people because the wages that we were authorized to pay wouldn't give them enough money to buy the food that they needed so we weren't really competitive. And then the new rice crop which was not failing was about to come in and here they got a living wage plus they could put handfuls of rice in their pants pockets and they could earn a lot more, in essence take home take a lot more than they could working for me. And working for me meant being guards, vaccinating around infected villages. Well I couldn't live with the idea that we could identify villages and then not protect them and not vaccinating those villages and not break the chain of transmission. And I sat down with one of my subordinates an Egyptian physician, Ali Salim [inaudible 25.32], wonderful man, and we sat up at night and thought about our dilemma and how we were going to resolve it. We had radioed back to Dhaka and they told us the price that we pay for each guard was fixed. I don't remember how much it was, fifteen taka a day or something like that but we couldn't pay anymore and we needed to pay more. And I said, "Look you're leaving me in an awkward position. I've got infected villages. I can't quarantine them, I can't vaccinate any of them. I don't have enough people." "Those are the rules." Okay. So Ali and I sat down and decided we were going to invent villages and were going to invent outbreaks, and we were going to invent workers and we did and we paid them the right wage on paper. And we encumbered then a lot of need for money which we then divided up among the real workers and paid them enough to keep them working for us and not harvesting the rice. So yes, I can tell you that and probably other stories as well about what we had to do to stop smallpox. Interviewer: Wow. Interviewee: Yes. Interviewer: Well, is there anything else that you would like to add or any other stories that you think? Interviewee: I think I've probably gotten myself in enough hot water you know. Interviewer: Like do you really want that story [inaudible 27.18]? No. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your time in sharing your experience with us. It all looks very interesting so thank you. Interviewee: Okay. </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-tJBUIy58qc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="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:/25593/16rzk emory:16rzk Subject The topic of the resource Bangladesh Smallpox Eradication Smallpox Eradication Smallpox Eradication Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 5947080000 bytes video/x-dv Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource McSwegin, Melissa (Interviewer) Music, Stanley (Interviewee) 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 MUSIC, STANLEY Description An account of the resource Dr. Stanley Music describes his experiences as an epidemiologist in Bangladesh with the Smallpox Eradication Program from 1973-1975. Language A language of the resource English https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/1b69668fd433228d7257c8f5d9a17d22.jpg 4f42519dab2c70d3d3646f95bd737664 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/2721a24d7815c916703b202fa7a95885.pdf 2b23c7214e5cad978f34e1027ba3b779 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 Audio File: Tim Miner Audio File Transcribed: January 28, 2009 Interviewer: My name is Ted Tolavoil. I'm a senior undergraduate at Emory University. We are at the CDC today interviewing Tim Miner and today's date is April 2nd, 2008 and the interviewee has given permission for this taping. First of all Tim if I could have you introduce yourself. Who are you and tell me a little bit about your background? Interviewee: Okay. My name is Howard Gordon Miner but I go by the nickname Tim and I've had that nickname from birth because when I was born there were already two other Howards in the family and they needed something to differentiate me from the rest of the Howards so I got the moniker Tim. I grew up in Detroit Michigan and left in nineteen seventy. I taught for a couple of years in the inner city in Detroit. I went to Swaziland in the peace corps in nineteen seventy and I'd just like to say [Foreign Dialect] which is Siswati for I'm very happy to see you now. So, I do recall some of the languages that I picked up along the way. I taught in Swaziland for a year until I discovered that we were taking jobs away from unemployed Swazi teachers so I mentioned to my peace corps director at the time I would like to go and do something else. I wasn't real enamored with teaching anyway and I certainly didn't want to un-employ a Swazi teacher. So because I spoke French they sent me to Zaire with the smallpox eradication program but they almost sent me to Morocco as an agricultural photographer so I could be in a whole different career by now if had I not gone to Zaire. In Zaire the smallpox program was headed by Dr. Pierre Ziegler and when I landed in Kinshasa I went first to the peace corps office and signed in and did all the paperwork and met all the people. And then went over to the WHO office in Kinshasa and had this lengthy conversation in French with Dr. Ziegler and I realized that I really needed to get up to speed on my French rather quickly. And so I did and he showed me how to give an immunization and he had a clinic there once a week. So there was a lady that came in and you know you have the bifurcated needle and you take the arm and kind of squeeze the flesh and rest your wrist on the arm and you just jab it a couple of times. So he said, "Why are you doing that? Tell me exactly what you're doing so that I know that you understand what I told you." So, I'm giving her the immunization and you're supposed to just prick the skin a little bit until there is a trace of blood. Well for those who speak French, the word for blood and the word for monkeys sound about the same. So as I was explaining what I was doing I said, "You just prick the skin until you see a trace monkeys." And everybody just broke out laughing because they couldn't understand why and the lady wondered what kind of vaccination I was giving here that she'd get a trace of monkeys on her skin. So, that was my introduction to the immunization program there. I went to my field station which was then in northern Shaba, ex- Katanga Province and there was another peace corps volunteer there, Ken Bloom. And so we did a [inaudible 03.39] in the field first and then came back and then he left and left me there but I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. While I was in Kinshasa with Dr. Ziegler he said, "All right you're peace corps volunteer but we don't want you to conduct yourself as a volunteer, tell anybody that you're a volunteer or live like a volunteer." I don't know what his preconceptions of volunteers were but I listened intently. And he said, "To make sure you don't live like a volunteer we're going to supplement your $75 a month income from the peace corps with an additional $400 from WHO." I said, "Works for me," so went out there in the field and took my station. I had three Land Rovers, an office, a furnished two bedroom apartment and a staff of four. So I was the [inaudible 04.35] to keep the team leader of a epidemiological investigation team and we were in the field about twenty eight days a month, back at the home base only two days a month because I like to travel and be in the field and there wasn't a lot to do at home base. And my African staff liked to be gone more so that they could be making money and they wouldn't be home spending it and having relatives come around and so and so forth as it was explained to me. So we were in town maybe two days to file a report and I had a two way radio so I could talk to Kinshasa. And there was Mr. Ali an Egyptian that ran the radio and I was talking to him and I said needed this piece of equipment to repair a Land Rover. And he said, "But what is it?" And I said, "Well I know what it is in French." I'd been so immersed in French I forgot, even though I grew up in Detroit, what this particular part was. And so I said, "Well I'll tell you in French and if you know what it is, you tell me what it is in English because I forgotten." So, he did that and we got the parts and went on. I was in Zaire at a particularly historical moment when Mobutu Sese Seko wa za Banga, the president of Zaire at the time was just initiating his authenticité campaign. So he renamed the Congo River the Zaire River, renamed the country Zaire, renamed the currency Zaire and told all Zairewa's, all citizens that they had to change their names from Christian names to African names. So I talked to my team and I said well - after I learned all their names I said, "Well you're going to have to tell me what you're African name is and then tell me whether you - how you want me to address you." And so that worked out fine. That wasn't a problem. When it came time for me to leave, when I went to Zaire I had to give another year to peace corps. Normally it's two years but since I had done one in Swaziland I went to Zaire for two years and part of the way through that I got home leave and I went to Geneva. And on a Sunday afternoon I went to the WHO headquarters and walked into D. A. Henderson's office and he was there on a Sunday afternoon. And I said, "Well D.A. I'd like - you know I've done this work in Zaire, I'd like to have a job. I'm going to be leaving the peace corps, I'd like to have a job with WHO if you think that's possible in another country." And he said, "Well, I'll look into it." Four weeks later I got back to Kinshasa and I was offered a job with WHO in Bangladesh but I had to go back to my post and turn over all the operations to the African staff at the time which I enjoyed doing because they were certainly capable of doing everything that I did. And it became a philosophy of mine in working in a host country to always whenever possible to have a host country counterpart working with me. And try to - I would try to build as much infrastructure or leave more than what I came with and that has been one of my standards that I've had. So I left the post, went to Kinshasa to visit peace corps and I couldn't find the office. The office had changed locations. So I found the office, walked into the office and they weren't the same people that were there. So I said - introduced who I was and said I'm ready to check out and that time John McEnany who I think also has done some work in smallpox was there and he said, "Oh yes, Tim Miner. I think I've seen your name somewhere. Where have you been? You've been gone for about two years." So all the staff, the office, everything had changed, all the people so we signed out of there and I headed off to Zaire via Nairobi - to Bangladesh via Nairobi. In Bangladesh, let me see, I - let me back up a little bit and tell you a brief story in Zaire about an immunization campaign. We used (pedajets) but we also used the bifurcated needles. Because the city of Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika was bordered on a rebel occupied area and we had some reports of smallpox in there but we really couldn't go into that area to investigate, what we decided to do, Ken Bloom and I was to hold a mass immunization campaign in that town or a little bit outside of town with the hopes that the people from that area would come in and be immunized. So that was my first mass vaccination campaign and we called Kinshasa and had them send us immunization certificates and some additional (pedajets) and vaccines and things and we held a mass campaign and that was really exciting because we had - the local person said everybody should come and you will get a certificate and they may be checking people to make sure that they had a certificate, that they had an immunization. So we had large crowds of people and we had to spread this out over about ten days to get everybody vaccinated but that was - that was a pretty exciting thing. And there's another city we visited on Lake Tanganyika and it was a mission there and I tried to stay at the missions because they had the best food, the best accommodations and a variety of beverages and the best conversation that was available at that time and if I were to fall ill I'd been in pretty good hands because there's nurses nearby and so on. At this one mission there was a Belgian Father, actually he was a German Father and he tanned hides. So I said well can you make me some shoes because my store bought American shoes didn't last very long and were getting kind of threadbare. He said sure. So I had him make a pair of boots a year for me and that's about how long they lasted but there was also - he tanned some other hides. I bought, and this was before environmentalists and so on and so forth so I had an alligator hide, a python skin that was probably about thirty feet long and a puff adder. And I sent those home to the States where my nieces and nephews used them as show and tell in schools and they were a big hit. So I'm back in - headed for Bangladesh now and I'm in Nairobi, through Nairobi to New Delhi and got an orientation in New Delhi and then went to Bangladesh. When I arrived in Bangladesh Stan Foster was there, Stan Music was there, Neilton Arnt from - Stan Foster and Music are from CDC, Nielton was Brazilian with WHO. Nick Ward, Dr. Ward is a physician from U.K. and then there was myself and I was the youngest, only non physician and I was the only one that wasn't married. So guess where I ended up working in Bangladesh? The most remote river line areas of the country. I had Barisal, Patuakhali and Faridpur and there was a hospital ship that the Germans had donated to Bangladesh a couple of years before I arrived and Stan had arranged for a bunch of -- they were moped like or vespa like Honda -- motor scooters to be put on all over the deck. And he said, "I want you to get on that boat and go down there and eradicate smallpox from those three provinces down there. I said, "Is that all? Any other instructions?" And so I did, got on the boat, introduced myself to the captain and I was able to supplement the pay of the crew nominally, nominally for the extra expenses I incurred and what they did. And so we towed a speedboat. This was - this ship was probably forty five, fifty feet long and had a draught of about three feet, three/four feet. It was fairly shallow and I had a forward cabin. And we had our immunization team on there and we went down to Barisal first and docked and stayed at a mission there for a couple of days. Met with the chief medical officers and then went on down to Faridpur. I taught my self Bengali, smallpox Bengali and to this day when I speak with Bengalis I meet in Atlanta and elsewhere I've been informed that I speak sort of like a villager or a fisher person not like a university professor which is fine because those are the people with whom I communicated all the time and didn't have any problems doing that. I was able to conduct a smallpox investigation by using my Bengali. All right an interesting - our team was made up of myself and we had a combination of Muslim and Hindu staff on the team. Vaccinators and interpreters and there was a chief and so on and everybody got along fine and it was just a wonderful experience. We had a speedboat driver as well and so we would get down in the morning into the speedboat and go off and investigate the reports that we had. And one time we were coming back rather late at night and there was a full moon and we were in the Brahmaputra which is the main river in Bangladesh. Then the river line areas there are a lot of channels and we were out in the main river and we were going rather fast. And the next thing we knew we were out of the boat, head over heels in the river but we weren't in the water. We had hit was is called a mud flab and in a mud - when the - you have a mud flab in the water and you can't tell because the water is just barely over the mud and the mud in the dark or in the moonlight reflects - seems to be water. So we hit that and the motor went up and all of us were thrown out of the boat in the middle of the river on this mud flab, covered in mud and when we got - regained our senses we were just laughing hysterically at the absurdity of the situation. We put our stuff back in the boat and pushed off and got back to the speed boat. One particular investigation that stands out to me is I went to a village and the villagers - this young man and some other people took me to this brand new hut. I mean it was just brand new, it had just been built and they said the patient is in there. And they led me inside and on the mat on the floor -- there was no furniture or anything else, there was just this mat on the floor in the middle of the hut -- was a person under a cover, a cloth, completely covered. And I was prepared to take the cover off and examine and see if it's smallpox and they just - they took the whole cover off themselves and there was this young woman covered with smallpox from head to toe of the confluent. There wasn't a space on this person that there wasn't a pox and so I knew right away what it was and thanked them and stepped out. And this young man starts explaining to me that this is his new wife, his new bride. And I said, "Gosh I feel very badly about that. I know that vaccinators had been in this village before would you - how come she wasn't vaccinated?" Was she away or something?" He said, "No." He said, "I hid her from the vaccinators because I didn't want her to have a smallpox scar on her skin." I said, "Oh I see." And you can't be judgmental or demonstrable, demonstrative or emotional at times like that. You have to really kind of step back emotionally a little bit from that. So I said "Well what would you do differently?" He said, "Well, I'm looking for another wife and my next wife will be vaccinated." But what struck me was that it was preventable and here was this young person, a young woman in just the beginning of her life with so much in front of her to look forward to, to being a mother, a grandmother, a husband, a sister and so on. And her life ended in such a tragic way. So I had several of these reminders throughout Bangladesh. I might add also that while working in Zaire I hadn't actually seen a real case of smallpox. It had been eradicated but we were monitoring it at the time. So Bangladesh was the first time that I had seen live smallpox and... Interviewer: What was your first impression when you arrived in Bangladesh? Interviewee: Well, when I arrived in Bangladesh and the subcontinent, I was impressed by the density of population. I had never seen, apart from a market in Africa, I had never seen so many people. I once did an experiment driving on the road trying to count ten seconds, just one and two and - up to the number ten, looking out the side of my window to see if there was ever any space where there wasn't evidence of human beings being there. So the land was either occupied by a house or a structure of some kind or it was planted. That was it. There was no vacant land, no land in Bangladesh that was not touched by human hands. We also because of the density when I was there, we had confined a lot of the smallpox cases and isolated them and we were in the process of eradicating them when the government tore down the basties or the slums of Dhaka. Just went in with bulldozers and it acted as a centrifuge spinning out cases of smallpox all over the country reintroducing smallpox into areas that had recently been freed of the cases. So that - our numbers of cases went sky rocketing again so that it was little disheartening. Another time I was down in the river line areas and Stan Foster was up in Dhaka and I think I was at the furthest most remote place at the time on the ship and I got on the radio and talked to Stan. And what we were trained to do was to investigate the cases of smallpox and find out who had been visiting and what were there names and where did they go and where did they live and so on and so forth. So as a matter of routine I gave Stan this information about who this person was and the name and when they visited and so and so forth and not really expecting that you know all these millions and millions he's going to find him but he did. He went to the address and he asked for the person and he found the person and immunized the person and was able to prevent the next generation of smallpox from that person having visited there. So anything is possible. We lived with the people in the host country. I lived on the ship, I lived with Bengalis all the time, I rarely saw another European. There was some care people that I would meet on occasion but I learned the language and the culture and they embraced me and I embraced them figuratively and it just worked very well. And I can't imagine eradicating smallpox with a kind of a visit and come out and then visit and come out type of approach. It didn't occur to me to do it any other way other than to go to a respective country and live there and work there and learn about the people and the culture and the religion and so on. I worked for six months in the river line areas on the hospital ship and was fairly able to get smallpox under control there. And then I was transferred to the north, Jamalpur and went from a boat to a motorcycle and that's when I met after I'd been working up there getting things organized, I met Steven Jones. Dr. Jones was up there and Marty Litz and Peter Hargrove and these are people I met and known since then. And we had people come from CDC, a lot of consultants as well, short term consultants for three months or six month stints. And I was having breakfast with one of the fellows and it usually consists of a chapatti and some eggs or something like that. And he said, "Well how do you manage with all of these poor raggedy kids and poor people and people kind of on their last leg and they look very unhealthy." And I said, "Yes I never know when I walk past someone coming back in the afternoon whether they'll be alive or dead," and that has happened many times. And I said, "Well you know, it's not that I'm unsympathetic or that I don't care but I know well enough that I can do one of two things. I can either devote my life to trying to alleviate the pain and the suffering and feeding and clothing of less fortunate people or I can do my job and eradicate - working to eradicate smallpox and that will benefit them. At least they won't die of smallpox." Well since then I've learned that Bangladesh has done quite well economically. Many of the clothes that I buy today are made in Bangladesh that weren't made in Bangladesh at the time and I understand that they are doing much better than when I was there at the time. So that's heartening to know. Interviewer2: In the book that's been written about smallpox in India, the author postulates that the only reason that smallpox was eradicated was by compulsion. Interviewee: Yeah. Smallpox could not have been eradicated by compulsion. People all over the world cannot be coerced for long to do something that they don't want to do themselves, that they don't want to do willingly. And I relied on reason and understanding and cultural sensitivity when explaining the benefits of immunizations and if somebody that chose not to then so be it. I felt very disappointed because I knew the preventive benefits of that but nobody was ever forced. And I had people approach me afterwards as I was leaving and say, "Come we've decided we want you to do some immunizing." We also out of respect for a variety of cultures engaged female vaccinators and that worked very well and so that we were able to honor the customs of the country and have ladies vaccinate ladies and so I think we did much better that way. But in Zaire and in Bangladesh and in Somalia where I worked there was never any thought of coercing people. Governments may issue declarations that there's a smallpox vaccination day or you should immunized for smallpox and so on but even when we were doing the mass campaign and there were police officials organizing the lines of people, there was nobody - they were there voluntarily and they recognized the benefits of the immunization as opposed to having the disease. So that's an important point to clarify. And by way of this tape I want to thank all of the host country nationals that have kept me safe over the years and to this day when I travel overseas. They're very protective and solicitous and very good people to be working with and I did not eradicate smallpox. I worked with hundreds, hundreds or thousands of Bengalis and Zairewa's and Somalis to do that and so it is - it's to their credit. They're the ones that are responsible for our success because if you show sensitivity and you show honesty and a true spirit, they'll go with you anywhere, any time, day or night, seven days a week to carry out the work. So this is something that I want the people that will view this tape in the future to know. That this was truly a global effort of people all over the world coming together for this - for this one cause and I don't think there had - apart from World Wars and even in World Wars there wasn't all the countries coming together. Some were in conflict but in this particular case to achieve the eradication of smallpox it's the first time in human history that a disease has been eradicated by human beings. That human beings have rid themselves of this pest that goes back to recorded history. And so I really would like to see something like that happen again because it's - they were really heady days and really wonderful, wonderful things to experience. After I finished in the northern in Bangladesh in the motorcycle, last six months I came down to Dhaka to be the finance officer and we had as many as seventy five or a hundred short term volunteers in Bangladesh at one time and everybody had to have money and everybody had to have a system of accounting for it. So based on my year and a half and handling and accounting of money I developed a spreadsheet. Now, we call it a spreadsheet but we didn't have Excel at that time. You had to draw something by hand and then had people look at it and review it and then it went to the printer and then they sent you a proof and then you looked at that to make sure it was all right because they were going to print a million copies of it so it better be right. And so I developed this spreadsheet about yea big and people would put a carbon paper. That's a - not too many people know what that is but anyway it allows you to write down one side of the paper and it will come through on the next page. So that's what we used and I was in charge of training the volunteers, the short term consultants that come in to account for this system. Very simple system. You get a receipt, make sure it has the date, write down what it was and put the number in sequence of what it was and put that number on your spreadsheet and just write down what it was and your beginning balance and then you're ending balance. That's all you have to do nothing more than that. And we gave them a briefcase of money and - of taka and they went off. And while we had these people out there with their briefcases full of money containing smallpox and what not, the government decided to have a demonetization effort. And they demonetized all the money and said all the money had to be returned to the bank and they'd give you a receipt for it because they're going to issue new currency. Well needless to say that put our campaign in a bit of a bind because people then couldn't get paid and so on. So our people had to go to the banks wherever they were in the field, turn in the money, get a receipt and we got a special dispensation from the president of the country and the head of the treasury that said we would be given - among the first ones to be given the new currency as soon as we turned in the old money so that we could keep the campaign going. So there were little exciting moments like this that happened from time to time and we were working with nationalities. All nationalities were involved and as you know the Americans and the Russians and I forget if it was originally the Russians idea and the Americans joined it or what it was but we got WHO to accept this program. And so in Bangladesh we were working occasionally with Russians and they liked our cigarettes and we liked their vodka so we'd you know trade and that stuff but they thought that were working for the CIA and we knew they were working for the KGB. I mean there just wasn't any way they'd be let out of the country if they weren't. None of us were CIA but you know you couldn't change their mind on that. So we worked with a lot of different nationalities and one character in particular stands out, Dr. Larry Brilliant. And he's a physician from Detroit and went to study with a guru in India and the guru said, "You're going to eradicate smallpox from India. You're going to join the smallpox eradication program,." and he went to D.A. and said, "I need a job." And the Nicole Grasset who's a French woman physician who headed the regional office of smallpox campaign in Delhi said, "No we really don't have anything for you." Went back to the guru and the guru said go back. Anyway he ended up working in the smallpox eradication program and was instrumental with others in getting Tata Industries to put in money and to organize their workers and have - support eradication efforts there. Now Tata Industries as you know just bought Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor Company so gives you an idea of how the world has changed. When I left Bangladesh I had decided that I needed - global public health was the love of my life. It was what I felt I was born to do. I wasn't going back to teaching. I really couldn't do anything else after having done something this exciting so I went back to Michigan via Asia and signed up at the University of Michigan School of Public Health to do an MPH. Well, who should I find there but Larry Brilliant as my academic advisor and Steve Jones is a student there as well. So I tell you, you just can't get away from these people. But I had to delay my admission to the University of Michigan. I had to call them up and said, "Well I have to go to the Cameroon." Stan Foster wanted me to go to Cameroon to do an assessment of the whole country's health system for the program that was to follow on from smallpox campaign which was the expanded program on immunization. So I designed a questionnaire, visited the whole country, every health facility in the whole country and left the report there and then went back to the University of Michigan to start my degree. While I was there I met Dave Hayman who was assigned there and he was taking over after Bernie Gayer that had left. And so I talked a little bit with Dave and showed him the report and he thanked me and we went off. And two years later, I forget what country I was in, maybe I was in the Philippines at the time, I got this note from David Hayman thanking me for this report. That it was so comprehensive that it has been the principal reference document for them in establishing their expanded program on immunization. And again that was made possible by traveling and working with and the support of the Cameroonians. I had a small staff and a driver that we went around to do that. That it's nothing I did by myself. So it's good to know that what you do, do works out quite well. Okay. A little bit about smallpox in Somalia. I was at the University of Michigan and Michigan liked the idea of a student coming in with the experience that I had and in the summer times working as a consultant. So I was invited to go and work in Somalia as a consultant for three year four months and I was assigned to a small town of Marka which is just south of Mogadishu. And Somalia was very safe at the time and there wasn't any problems, anything like there is now and because of the lack of availability of food we were on sea rations. So we had little Bunsen burner and we opened the cans and cooked our food. In the town of Marka lived the world's last case of smallpox and I've forgotten his name but he - we were doing a scab survey so I needed to interview. The word went out that I needed to interview anybody that had pox or of course scabs. And he showed up and introduced himself and I knew who he was and he said, "You know I've been interviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The London Times and The Straits Times and newspapers all over the world by these reporters and they pay me handsomely for the interviews. What do you have for me?" And I said, "Well I don't work for a fancy newspaper, I'm not a reporter and all I have is you know a couple of cans of this sea rations that I have, a couple of aspirin and maybe some malaria tablets but to tell you the truth that's all I have." With a little bit of pause he said, "Okay. We'll do it." So I interviewed him and that was a telling moment. Another instance Dave - not Dave - Peter Kraskow and I went -- he was working there as well -- went and lived with the nomads and their camels for about a week. And we did some blood sticks for antibody levels in neonates and I did a paper at the University of Michigan on those findings. And it was really enjoyable. Whenever I go to a country I really like to be with the people and learn of their customs and certainly their language which is a beginning to opening doors to their culture. I always try and learn just a few words of a language and in Somalia there were no smallpox cases at the time but we almost lost a couple of people. I remember one time coming back to a base camp that we had with some officers and things, finding Peter Kraskow on the floor of the lavatory. He had passed out so I got him back up and we got him healthy again and that was all right but Steve Fitzgerald who was working in the north -- I forget the name of the districts, were way, way in the north there -- almost died of dehydration. He had a bad case of diarrhea and all that he and his driver could do is pull off by the side of the road and underneath the tree and he had some re- hydration salts and some purified water and so the driver nursed Steve back to health enough so that he could get back to Mogadishu and continue his work. Interviewer2: I think we could go on all afternoon with this Howard. Interviewee: We could Interviewer2: [Inaudible 40.12] finish off with... Interviewer: What this means or how it has changed me or... Interviewer: Exactly, yeah. Interviewee: Okay. Interviewer2: I think you have pretty much told us what it's done for you. Interviewee: Right. In fact it has changed my life. Just a couple of sentences. When I had dinner with Ken Bloom and his wife Lois who also helped with the eradication program in Bangladesh and we ran into them in Boston many years ago, they had children at the time, my wife and I didn't. They said, "Well if you had children it's going to change your life forever," and I didn't quite know what they were talking about until we had children and it will change your life forever. And it's how I would attribute my work and experience with the smallpox eradication program. It has changed my life, changed my life forever. I wouldn't trade any of it, I wouldn't do any of it - I would do it all over again about the same way that I had in the past but it's just a rare opportunity. And when I'm back and I meet with people and tell them a little bit about that I make an effort to thank them for their contributions to the programs because they're tax payers and it's rare that a taxpayer really has any kind of connection with what's going on overseas and how their tax dollars are being spent overseas. So I try and make an effort to that to bring them into the activity of it themselves. I'm grateful for the opportunity. Interviwer2: That was a great interview. It truly was. </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIKcPkaZ0Kk" 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 2008-04-02 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/15pjn emory:15pjn Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 9037560000 bytes video/x-dv Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tolavoil, Ted (Interviewer); Emory University Miner, Tim (Interviewee); CDC 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 MINER, HOWARD "TIM" Description An account of the resource Tim Miner was a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to the Smallpox Eradication Program in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and then later Bangladesh. Tim recounts many tales from the field and how this experience has influenced his life. Subject The topic of the resource Smallpox Eradication Language A language of the resource English https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/54a001c3adbdad32e563666a7e044879.jpg eca63236a0238d140a941f47d4589827 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/cf36c4cf42ab778f098348ab7657d124.pdf 87532066f4be21f88ff723979948bbb8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound. <pre><strong> Interview Transcript </strong> Interview Dr Mark Rosenberg with Interviewer Dr David Sencer Transcribed: January 26, 2009 | Duration: 0:40:25 David Sencer: I am David Sencer. I am interviewing Dr. Mark Rosenberg. We're on the stage at CDC: April 3, 2008. Dr. Rosenberg has been informed that he is being filmed and audioed and has signed a release for us. So we'll start. Tell me a little bit about your early days. Mark Rosenberg: I grew up in a family that was committed to social service and community action: health, medicine, public welfare, and I had a father who was very interested and active in his unions. He was in a good union, the International Typographical Union, and didn't go to college until he put all his kids through college, and my mother was a physician and she practiced for 61 years in Montclair, New Jersey, the town where we grew up, and she did some very good things, socially active things in New Jersey. She was the first physician ever to see black people as patients in her office. She volunteered for Planned Parenthood and she was the physician at Montclair State College for about 35 years and maintained a private practice for a long time. I think she was a very important influence. I'd like to think that I made a rational choice to go into medicine for reasons X, Y and Z, but I think probably trailing her around for a long time, seeing what she did, and having that kind of spillover, being exposed to how much she valued what she did, probably influenced me to go into medicine. I went into medicine I guess after college, I went to medical school and was always still interested in public service and during medical school, took time off to go study Government and Public Policy at the Kennedy School for the first year that it never had a combined MD/MPP program. So I went there, spent a couple of years there and then did an internship, and a residency and then I had signed up for a draft deferment, but the draft had ended before I went, and came to CDC because it was something I wanted to do. It seemed like an interesting way to learn about Public Health and came here and was in the Enteric Diseases Branch for two years with a very, very good crew of people, and it was an exciting branch. We had lots of outbreaks. We had salmonella, shigella, botulism, waterborne diseases, and the opportunity came up to go work on smallpox in India and it seemed like a fascinating chance to do something very different from enteric diseases in the United States, so I signed up to go off to India. I did not have any idea what to expect. David Sencer: What was your first impression of India? Mark Rosenberg: I thought I had stepped into the set of a movie, a movie that started 2000 years ago and was an unbelievable mix of people. I went to West Bengal and we were around Calcutta and spent a lot of time in Calcutta, and I just thought that it was a fascinating city, and an incredible place, the mix of people, people driving in cars and people living on the streets. The other thing, I've always been interested in photography and I decided then to do a lot of photography in India and I just remembered the scenes of incredibly beautiful brown bodies throughout the States. I mean, people in the fields, working in the sun and starting to sweat, people getting up in the morning on the streets as the sun started to go up, living on the streets, but living very clean lives, bathing, living, feeding, raising families while living on the streets. Visually, it was an incredible place to be. David Sencer: Was all of your time in India spent in West Bengal? Mark Rosenberg: Just about-the time working was in West Bengal, but then at the end I took an extra month and went with Jill who was to become my wife and we traveled around to more of the standard tourist places. We went to Delhi, we went to the Taj Mahal, we went to the Ganges, we went to Asan; we went to Darjeeling, Nepal, Katmandu. We traveled a fair amount. David Sencer: Was there much smallpox in Calcutta when you were there? Mark Rosenberg: Unfortunately, there was none that I could find. When we got there in 1976, we were searching for cases and that was basically the work that I did during the day and evenings. We went around; a team with myself, the driver and an interpreter, looking for cases of smallpox and we put out rewards, but the cases that were reported to us were really chickenpox at that time, and the reward started going up and up and up, and we didn't find a single case of smallpox. It made me feel like we were kind of in a second wave and I wished I had been there when there was smallpox because we were kind of the clean-up crew. David Sencer: Were you there on your own or were there other people from CDC and WHO? Mark Rosenberg: There were other people from CDC who went over with me at about the same time. Dick Jackson, I remember went at the same time, then we ended up back at CDC. We both left for awhile after our EIS time and then came back to CDC and serve there at the same time. So there were several people from CDC. David Sencer: Was he in West Bengal or no? Mark Rosenberg: I don't think Dick was in West Bengal. David Sencer: But you were there alone? Mark Rosenberg: No. There was someone from Czechoslovakia, Fred Bagar [inaudible0:06:41] and he was there. He was an older person who had served as a Community or State Epidemiologist in Czechoslovakia and then had come back to do this service, so we were there together, and saw each other when we came back to the city. We spent most of our time in the - suburbs isn't the right term, but outside of Calcutta, in the very small villages, driving around routinely, but also then taking detours where there was a report of a case, we'd go check it out. David Sencer: Who handled your administrative details? Mark Rosenberg: There was someone assigned from WHO and I don't remember the name of the person, but someone in Calcutta itself. David Sencer: Bill Foege had left India by then? Mark Rosenberg: I think he did. I think he was ordered back by someone - or no, he wasn't ordered back, he came back against orders- that's right. That was the amazing story that Bill had left. So I didn't really encounter Bill in India at the time that we were there. The person who was in charge was a French person who was assigned by WHO. David Sencer: Nicole. Mark Rosenberg: I think so. David Sencer: Grasset. Mark Rosenberg: Yes; and [pause] no - Bill had been there; and I didn't really get to know Bill until we came back and then he was - there was a Preventive Medicine Residency Head back here, so what Dave worked with Bill on was back here, at the case of Crater Lake. We worked that up into a teaching case for Preventive Medicine Residence, but unfortunately, he wasn't in India when I was there. I'm sure you have this story about Bill's departure from there, but it's one that impresses me. One of the things that we work on now is the issue of collaboration and coalitions, and we've looked at lots of coalitions in global health, looking for the elements that make them work: When are they successful, when are they not? What you need to think about when first putting them together? How do you frame that last mile? What do you set as your goal? Because the most important element in any successful coalition is framing that last mile in a way that everyone develops this shared goal; and that is an overriding goal and a motivating goal to keep you together. So we've studied a lot of coalitions in global health because as it turns out, even though there are many coalitions formed, very few of them succeed. So one of the stories that we talked about is what's necessary for a good leader to be an effective leader of a coalition; and one of the things that you need is really this quality of ego submersion. You need to be willing to step back and let your partners stand in the spotlight and get the attention, get the publicity, let them get the credit. I don't think there's ever been anyone as good as Bill in doing that; and the story that always impresses me whenever I think of this notion of ego submersion is Bill going to India, when he was sent there by you to work and to apply the containment theory and as I heard it, Bill decided that several months before the last case was eradicated in India, he would come back home; and he could come back home because the containment theory, even though it was questioned at times and almost reversed by the Minister of Health, they were able to continue it long enough to see it succeed; and within a very short period of time, less than two years, the cases started to fall very close to zero. When Bill saw that they were going to eradicate the last case maybe six months later, he called you, his boss at CDC and said I'm coming home and I'm bringing my family home; and he told me you told him, "You can't come home. You've got to stay. Don't you realize that what's going to happen in six months is some historic landmark that's never been matched in the annals of Public Health? They're going to go from 83,000 cases down to zero in two years and this is going to be a momentous day. You've got to stay there for this." And Bill said, "No. I'm coming home and my family's coming home because if I'm still here when this last case is eradicated, then all the credit is going to go to the foreigners. It's going to go to the Americans-and this is something that's got to be credited to the Indians. They did it. They made it happen; and if I'm here, they won't get the credit that they need. I'm coming home." And you said, "No. You're not." He said, "Yes, I am." He packed up, he put his family together and they left India and they came home. They weren't able to get into their home because the keys that were sent to him to get in were not the right keys to get in, but he came home. He packed up and left. That was an extraordinary thing, but I've never come across an example of ego submersion that's so complete and so universal in everything he does. Still-in everything he does. David Sencer: What effect on your life did your short term in India have? Mark Rosenberg: I think I'm just learning the ways that it had an effect on my life. It gave me an experience in global health that complemented what was mostly a domestic outbreak investigation that I had. I don't think there was ever any question in my mind even when I was doing outbreak investigations as an EIS Officer. There was no question that I wanted to stay with public health and would stay with public health. But I think this really solidified it. It was just - it was going into another world. I mean, stepping off the plane out of the modern world, into the world that was 2000 years old and unchanged; and you could step onto a street where there were cows and elephants, people walking, people sleeping, people selling, people eating and bathing, and shaving on the street in a scene that was unchanged for hundreds and hundreds of years. To have witnessed that and to have been there was an amazing, amazing experience. It made me see that there's not just one world, but there are multiple worlds that exist at the same time, and I don't think there's any place as rich as India. Even today, you see multiple worlds existing side by side, people being shaved in the middle of a street that's now a major road around the modern city of Delhi. People living their lives somewhat oblivious to the motorized traffic that goes by and to the people who go by in Mercedes, and to the people who are doing business in high skyscrapers, but multiple worlds living together at the same time. I think you need to understand that if you're really going to work in global health, that there are multiple worlds where people live and are born and get sick and die, in parallel universes at the same time. But it was an amazing impact on me. I went on to go back - we went back from Atlanta up to Boston. I'd signed up to do a Fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Mass General, but I decided that I had done a lot of photography in India and wanted to do more photography; and so, deferred this fellowship in infectious diseases and ended up spending a couple of years, working on a photographic documentary of patients and illness, trying to show what it was like to be sick. I knew what it was like to be sick, but during this experience I realized that being a doctor is a separate world from being the patient. It's like these separate worlds that existed in India. The same thing exists here and doctors think they know the world of patients, but doctors know the world of doctors. They know sickness from the perspective of the doctor, not from the perspective of the patient. So I spent some time doing this photographic documentary and spent hours and days and weeks and months with the patient seeing their story and taking photographs, and interviewing them to put together their stories. Again, that was a transformative experience for me. It was an amazing experience; and I really realized that I didn't have the faintest idea of what it was like to be a patient. I didn't even know that I didn't know what it was like to be a patient, and this experience really showed me that other world. It was also an amazing experience. David Sencer: Did you hear Anne Fadiman[0:16:17] when she was here? Mark Rosenberg: I didn't hear her. I was sorry to have missed her, but I think she tells the story in an amazing way. David Sencer: One of the things that I remember is, she said, "You don't catch a disease. The disease catches you." She was advocating - one of the things that she advocated was that every chart should have a picture on the cover of the family. Mark Rosenberg: [Pause] - That is a powerful voice. David Sencer: Yes. Mark Rosenberg: You know, for the patient. David Sencer: Is there anything else about smallpox you'd like to say? Mark Rosenberg: I'd like to say that this revisiting it for this 30th Anniversary of the eradication has been a wonderful thing. It made me realize what a significant event it was; and again, the idea that we could eradicate a disease has certainly affected a lot of the other work that we do. I work now at the Taskforce for Child Survival and Development, the taskforce that was started by Bill Foege when he left CDC and we work on a number of diseases where we're aiming for - if not complete eradication, at least elimination as a Public Health problem or eradication of one aspect of the disease. So we work on river blindness and there's been tremendous progress. We've delivered over 700 million treatments of Mectizan for river blindness. We're embarking on a program where we're treating intestinal infections, intestinal parasitic infections in young children probably is the most widespread infectious disease of children in every place in the world. There are probably two billion people at risk for these intestinal parasites. I think in all the work that we do, we're inspired by the idea of eradication, and by the possibility of eradication. I think we think very differently about eradication, knowing that it was done and it has been done even in diseases that are not infectious diseases. The latest example is an area of road traffic injuries, but most people think of road traffic injuries as accidents, things that just have to happen, and in fact, road traffic injuries are an epidemic. They're an epidemic beyond people's ability to imagine, but there are more than 1.2 million road traffic deaths every year. For every death, there are between 20 and 50 serious injuries; and the predictions are that, if we don't do anything about this problem, most of which exist in the developing world. It's 85-90% in low and middle income countries. If we don't do anything to speed their ability to address the problem and turn this around, and if it takes them as long as it took us as being the United States, the U.K. or New Zealand, Australia. If it takes them as long as it took us then we will loose 100 million lives to road traffic injuries. We have the tools to prevent it. We have the equivalent of vaccines for road traffic injuries right now, but it's a horrible epidemic that's coming. For many people, they don't pay much attention to this. They say these are just accidents, they are just part of modern day life and it's this fatalism that's so bad and that keeps it going. But in Sweden - in Sweden, a group of dedicated people said, "We can eradicate road traffic deaths. We don't have to have any of them at all. We can completely eradicate this problem and wipe it out." They said, "We can do the same thing to road traffic injuries that was done for smallpox. We can eradicate it." They started talking about this about 30 years ago, and when they started talking about it, people just laughed and said, "You're crazy." As you add more cars, as more people start driving, you build more roads. The number is going to go up. Inevitably, it'll go up; and they said: it's not inevitable that we can eradicate this. They started working to build safer roads. For example: they took out red light intersections and put in traffic circles. They told me, "Red light intersections cause deaths. How? Because what happens when you get to a yellow light? When the light turns yellow, many people speed up; you cause a high speed collision and that high speed collision is fatal, and red lights actually kill people." So they took all of these red light intersections out and they put in traffic circles, and the death rate came down by 90%-ninety percent. That's as effective as our very best interventions in public health or global health. It's as effective as our best vaccines. So step by step, they built safer roads; they put barriers down the middle that also brought the rates down by 70-80%. They built safer cars, Sweden is famous for that and they made people obey speeding and drinking and driving laws; and by doing that, they brought their death rate down incredibly low. They started with a focus on children and 30 years ago there were probably about 137 children who died in the road traffic crashes; gradually came down 135, 131, 127. Three years ago, there were 11. Two years ago, there was just one death of a child in the road traffic crashes. Vision Zero is what they called this campaign and it's inspired by smallpox and they're going to eradicate road traffic deaths. I think this is going to inspire the world to start to turn this down. Three days ago, we were at the UN; the general assembly met and it met just on the topic of road traffic deaths. This epidemic now is really bad. The global burden of disease from road traffic deaths is greater than malaria and it's greater than TB, greater than both of those, and the general assembly met and they passed a resolution that for the first time ever, there will be a UN Global Ministerial Conference on this issue. It's going to come to light, and this notion of Vision Zero that you can eradicate road traffic deaths is going to drive this Ministerial Conference, and it's going to drive the world to change-that comes from smallpox. It's a lesson learned from smallpox. They wouldn't have been so brazen. They never would've thought of the idea of eradication, had it not been for the success of smallpox. So I think we often think: How has it affected our notion of infectious diseases? It's gotten well beyond infectious disease and this whole notion of Vision Zero really owes a big debt of gratitude to the eradication of smallpox. I think it has affected our thinking; it has affected our approach and hopefully it will affect what we can deliver for the good of mankind. David Sencer: Thank you. If we could just switch gears for a minute: Do you want to take five minutes and tell us about St. Helen? Mark Rosenberg: St. Helen? I didn't - Crater Lake or St. Helen? David Sencer: Crater Lake, rather. Mark Rosenberg: Crater Lake. Yes, [pause]. David Sencer: This is for the other archives. Mark Rosenberg: Okay. So I don't have to tie it into smallpox eradication? Crater Lake was an incredible adventure. We got a call one day in the Enteric Diseases Branch that Jean Gangarossa[0:24:29] and Mike Merson who were our supervisors and they said that a lot of people were getting sick at this park in Crater Lake, Oregon; and they think maybe there's a problem there. They're not sure, but maybe it's a problem that CDC ought to help them with. So the Preventive Medicine Resident was sent out there to do a quick and dirty survey to find if there really were people still getting sick and was it widespread. This Preventive Medicine President named Jeff Koplan, did this quick and dirty survey and then we had a conference call back in the Enteric Diseases Branch. Everyone huddled around the phone while Jeff said: yes; it had an attack rate that seems among the staff to be well over 80% and that on tour buses, people were still getting sick after going to the park. They had no idea what was causing it, but could we send someone out from Enteric Diseases and could we do an epidemic aid investigation. So I got sent out the next day. I flew out. I had to fly first to San Francisco then Crater Lake, a National Park. It's a 200-square-acre track that has the main point of interest as an extinct volcanic crater that's been filled completely with water. This lake is 2,000 feet deep and it's billed as the world's cleanest water, and it's billed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, Crater Lake. So I got sent out to Crater Lake because something was wrong. I got to San Francisco but I missed the connection. I left home, probably at about 5:00 a.m. to get to the airport here. I missed the connection there, then waited around five hours in San Francisco, flew up to, I think Medford, Oregon, and then rented a car. This was now late at night - very late at night and I had to drive through woods and through forestland for about four more hours, finally arriving at Crater Lake at about 2:00 a.m. Eastern Time; and when I got there and everyone was sitting around: the Youth Conservation Corps, Jeff Koplan; people were sitting there and I was more than ready for bed, but they showed me some reports of the water and I looked at these reports of very high coliform content and then they said, "What do you think about this?" I guess I told them what I thought about that. Then the next day, we got up early. It was still all covered in snow, because even though it was in July, the snow doesn't melt except for a very short period, at the end of July and August. So we started out and because of these high attack rates, we thought this was waterborne, but we couldn't prove it. So we set out collecting some water samples. We tried to look at the water delivery system in the park. They said, "You don't have to worry about the water because this is the cleanest water in the world and this water comes from a deep underground well- it's got to be clean. It can't be the water." Well we were nervous because everyone on the park's staff was sick. The Park Superintendent had been sick for so long, he'd lost 35 pounds. Everyone in his family was sick. The attack rate among the staff was over 80%; among the Youth Conservation Corps it was almost 100% attack of a disease characterized - people were throwing up, vomiting and then they had sustained diarrhea, and the Park Superintendent, until two days ago, hadn't even thought this was a problem. He thought, Ah! 35 pounds of weight loss, three weeks of diarrhea, my whole family is sick. It's just the bug. This is the flu bug. In fact, the person who ran the concession at Crater Lake told them, "This is just the flu. This is what comes every year. It's nothing. You don't have to look into this." In fact, he had told all his employees to keep working; and so the Chef was sick, had this vomiting illness, but he kept a little bucket on the stove where when he got sick, he could use his bucket, and the owner of the concession had told everyone, "Just keep working. You know, if you have really horrible diarrhea or if you're vomiting, carry a bottle of Pepto-Bismol around with you and sweak[inaudible0:29:00] that as you go. After a day, the snow started to melt so we could start to get some water samples and see that the sewer system had been jerry- rigged and water was going up to the area near the lake with no chlorine in it. So we sent some more samples to be analyzed. It turned out, these also came back highly contaminated and people were still getting sick. We did some quick and dirty surveys; and by the end of the next day, we had rough estimates that there were 3,000 visitors a day to the park and that about 70- 80% of them were still getting sick. So we spoke to our bosses back here at CDC. We said, "We think you ought to close the park." They said, "On what basis do you propose closing the park?" And we said, "It's a very high attack rate. It's a very serious illness. There are old people who come here. If they get sick and dehydrated, they could die. We think we ought to close the park, and we think there's nothing else that explains this high attack rate: that is food and waterborne and we think it's the water, but we'll get the evidence." Our bosses said, "No. You need to keep the park open. You need to collect evidence. You just have convenient samples of people calling in from the buses and tours who come, and you need to keep checking." And they said, "Besides, how'd you know it's the water? Maybe this is some mosquito-borne illness. But we have never heard of a mosquito-borne illness that causes this level of attacks in diarrhea, but we kept working. The snow kept melting and the next day, I was doing rectal swabs because we had to get cultures, bacterial cultures to look for the culprit, and I think I had finished about 230 rectal swabs. I was ready for a break and Jeff Koplan called me up. He said, "You've got to come out here and look at this." The snow had melted and they found a sewer that had been blocked and it had all backed up and the sewage looked like it was running downhill towards the stream. We put some fluorescence dye up behind the sewage to see if there was contamination from the sewage into the drinking water, then we used fluorescence because just one part per million would show up under ultraviolet light; and we thought no one would be bothered by seeing this in the drinking water, but we could see if the water got contaminated. But it turned out that the drinking water was this little surface stream. The surface stream was just downhill from where the sewage was backed up. So if you can imagine, bright fluorescent green sewage flowing down the snow-covered hill into the drinking water, turning the water green. This was incredibly heavy contamination and we decided at that point that - and this is the drinking water for the whole park. People would come to the park. There was no other source of water. We thought we could bring in bottled water, but that would take days to bring it in. So we thought that the park really needed to be closed down. So we started issuing signs and putting them around, "Don't Drink the Water. Don't Touch the Drinking Water. It's Not Safe for Anything Except for Flushing Toilets." We went to the concessionaire, we said, "Don't share food to the people who are here because you are going to serve food cooked with contaminated water. You're going to serve on plates that have been washed in contaminated water. Don't do it." He said, "I've got to serve them breakfast. I've got to serve them breakfast." Then we said, "Okay. Then serve potato chips and things that come in bags, but nothing cooked." He served breakfast the way he usually does with oatmeal made with this crate water, with eggs made with this crate water, on plates cleaned with this crate water, but we had a conference call, there had never been a case of a National Park being shut down due to illness in the history. So we had to figure out how do you close a National Park that had never been shut? And so CDC didn't have the ability to declare it shut, but CDC dealt with the Bureau of the Interior and they finally got permission to shut down this park, and it was shutdown that next day. It was the first time in history that a National Park had been shutdown due to illness. The park was closed and they had this massive cleanup job. Massive because all the water, all the pipes were contaminated basically by sewage, and then the drinking water, if you let it settle, you could see particulate sewage in the water. After several weeks the park was re-opened and people went back. There were sporadic cases of continuing illness, but we went back to investigate that. It turned out that that was just sporadic illness and the water was clean; there is no more waterborne disease: and we thought, Thank goodness. Thank goodness we're finished. This was one big outbreak. Then, I think a few weeks later you, Dave, came into my office with your sleeves rolled up and you were carrying a letter. You said - so I was this EIS Officer, still pretty intimidated by what went on - and this was a letter; and I think it was from Congress and it was saying that; "There's going to be a congressional investigation of whether or not there was a cover-up at Crater Lake. They said, "Would you please explain, Dr. Rosenberg for the record, if what you said when you first arrived there that night when they showed you these water samples, would you explain if you really said this; and if you said it, why didn't you close the park as soon as you got there?" And it said, "This is what you're quoted as saying Dr. Rosenberg; when you got there that night and you were shown the water samples, you said, 'You've been drinking pure shit.' If you said that, why didn't you close the park right away?" So this became a long series. We had to prepare - it wasn't clear to me how you respond to that kind of letter. You were very cool. You were very calm. I would've thought that if I had one of my low level employees saying this kind of thing, and on the Congressional record, that I would've gotten rid of him post haste. But you were very patient. You said, "We're going to prepare a response. We'll figure this out. We'll figure the right way to respond." And we did. Then we testified. There was a Congressional hearing out there in Medford, Oregon, and we went and we testified, and I still have the Congressional record from that hearing because the first three pages are solely devoted to whether or not, Dr. Rosenberg actually said, "You've been drinking pure shit." Three (3) pages of Congressional record; and the Superintendent of the park was very sympathetic; he said, "Dr. Rosenberg never would have said that. He must've said: You've been drinking animal waste." Then someone else asked him, "How would he know it was animal waste instead of human?" I'm sure I said what I was accused of saying. I was tired. I was exhausted. I thought I was talking to friends, but that became a teaching case of Crater Lake and there are lots of lessons to be learned, both how we handled it and what you might expect. David Sencer: After that, your name was Shit? Mark Rosenberg: It was and in certain places, it still is. But we survived. David Sencer: Those were my - [crosstalk 0:37:24] Mark Rosenberg: Let me just add. I think for me, I always knew that the Director of CDC, when I was there as the EIS Officer, was special, because you would always come around - we were in the Enteric Diseases branch and you would always come around the day before the MNWR was coming out. We have lots of stories about whether it's Salmonella outbreaks, church picnics, eating contaminated food, and there's always something in Enteric Diseases Branch coming out in the MNWR; and you always came by. You always came by with your shirt sleeves rolled up and you would sit down with us and go over it and ask us some questions about it, and you cared about what we were doing. You spoke to us and we were EIS Officers, and you were the Director of CDC and you came by, totally without pretense, without arrogance, just to sit down with us with your shirt sleeves rolled up, and that had an incredible impact. Not just on me, on all the EIS Officers. You knew them. You spoke to them. You deigned [0:38:28] to have contact with them. It was an amazing and wonderful thing. Then when this letter came from Crater Lake where you came and you sat down with me and you had that letter, I thought I would've been fired on the spot; and instead, you said, "Let's figure out how we're going to respond to this." And it was together. Let's figure out together how we deal with this. I thought, "What an amazing man?" What an amazing man you were? You remained so and you still are, but that was certainly a formative experience for me; an amazing experience and a wonderful experience. David Sencer: Just one of those things at CDC-Just another day. Mark Rosenberg: It wasn't just one of those things. Not at all! There are some things small that happens everyday, but something really, really important. I think as an EIS Officer, one of the things you learn is how to bear yourself and how to conduct yourself in this world and with your colleagues and in your business, and I think if you're lucky - if you're lucky, you get to connect with mentors who are an example that's always held out there. I always remember a book by William Golding, the author of "Lord of the Flies" and in his book, he said that, "Our lives are constructed out of bricks and we build our lives one brick at a time. But the bricks aren't the ideas. The bricks with which we construct our lives are people. They're the people that we meet." You've been a brick for me, a very important brick, a very important part of my life, and an amazing thing and I am so ever grateful that I had the chance to work with you. David Sencer: You were one of the products of Montclair, New Jersey, that wasn't cheaper by the dozen. Mark Rosenberg: Well, thanks. David Sencer: Thank you, Mark. Mark Rosenberg: Thanks, Dave. [End of audio - 0:40:24] </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6tqcIUqtGxs" 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 2008-07-29 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/15pd3 emory:15pd3 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 8724720000 bytes video/x-dv Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rosenberg, Mark (Interviewee); cdc Sencer, David (Interviewer) 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 ROSENBERG, MARK L. Description An account of the resource Dr. Mark Rosenberg served as an field epidemiologist in India with the Smallpox Eradication Program. Subject The topic of the resource oral history Language A language of the resource English https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/f73d2d20ec150546bec76caae64b6f20.jpg 5404ce394e5683319a862342c4df2150 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/aeacc17b4c47d6f723c41953287e3d2e.pdf 40235d76e6cd3b027e5767c2519ecdfb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource <div class="landing"> <p>Smallpox disease was declared eradicated in 1980, the result of a collaborative global campaign. To date, it is the only disease affecting humans to be eradicated from the world. Global eradication of smallpox ranks among the great achievements of humankind. Gone, through determined human effort, is a disease which has brought death to millions, frequently altering the course of history, and traveling through the centuries to every part of the world.  </p> <p>The vital contributions made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighted. Official government correspondence, meeting transcripts, policy statements, surveillance reports and mortality statistics tell a part of that story. Adding depth to these traditional archives are the personal stories of the public health pioneers who worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the smallpox eradication campaign.</p> <p>The links above connect you to a database of oral histories, photographs, documents, and other media.</p> <p>Use of this information is free, but please see <strong>“About this Site”</strong> for guidance on how to acknowledge the sources of the information used</p> </div> Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound. <pre><strong> Interview Transcript </strong> Interview Dr. Bruce Weniger with Dr David Sencer Transcribed: January 2009 | 0:31:56] Dr. Weniger: First, this is Dr. Bruce Weniger, who is currently a CDC employee. I am Dr. Sencer doing the interviewing. It's March 31st 2008 at 1:15-Bruce knows that this is being recorded and has signed permission for us to use it. Dr. Sencer: Tell me a little about your early days, Bruce. Dr. Weniger: Well, I got involved with the Smallpox Program actually before I - Dr. Sencer: Let's go back to earlier than that-where are you from? Dr. Weniger: Well, I was born in New York, and grew up in New York and went to college at Brown for a few years and then an Experimental School in New York State, University at Old Westbury, and then did a year of Law School at Berkeley, and then did my pre-med courses when I decided that law was not as interesting as I thought medicine would be, and then completed those and got into UCLA School of Medicine and did my Medical and Public Health Degrees at UCLA in Los Angeles. Dr. Sencer: Why did you come into Public Health Service? Dr. Weniger: Well, my role model there was Sandhu - I am trying to remember his name. I am forgetting the name of the person who was on the staff there who had been a CDC EIS graduate, I'll probably think of it eventually-and became interested in public health because you were treating the whole community rather than one patient at a time and it was exciting. So immediately after doing that two years of pediatrics training I applied to the EIS Program and got in, in 1980 and started in Parasitic Diseases and then did Preventive Medicine Residency at the University of Oregon State Health Department and then Phil Brockwin[unsure of 0:02:22] assigned me to the Field Epidemiology Training Program in Thailand where I did a three-year tour of duty as the Second WHO Advisor to the FETPs as they were called, which were basically carbon copies of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the Thailand one was the first one outside of CDC around the world. I went back to CDC after that for a few years, working in International Health and then went back in 1990 to found and start the CDC HIV AIDS Field Research Station in Bangkok in collaboration with the Thai Government that I'd gotten to know during my first assignment there. So we began that project and when I left it had about 40 Thai nationals and two Americans, me and Nancy Young, and now it's a multi-million dollar project with like 10 or 15 Americans and 100 or so, or more, Thai nationals. Dr. Sencer: How did you happen to get involved with the Smallpox Program? Dr. Weniger: Well, I was at the time at the UCLA School of Public Health and Medicine and Davida Coady was on the faculty there, had worked in India on smallpox and at the time in '75 there was a need for surge, if you pardon the expression, of a large number of personnel to go into Bangladesh and India because of some problems with the displacements of people from natural disasters and a whole bunch of new outbreaks that were occurring, and so I was among about a dozen or so people from Los Angeles, UCLA and elsewhere that were brought over as short- term consultants for WHO and she recommended my name. Peter Drockman[inaudible name0:03:40], Mike Cenerelli, Mark Strasburg, and a number of other names you may recall were in that cohort that went around June of 1975 to Bangladesh and spent three months there. Dr. Sencer: This was before you came to CDC? Dr. Weniger: It's actually before I came to CDC, but I still got credit with my little ribbon on my uniform, Stan Foster was kind enough to give me credit for that. Dr. Sencer: Who was your supervisor in Bangladesh? Dr. Weniger: I would say Nick Ward was one of them. Of course, Stan Foster ran the program and Andy Hagel[inaudible name0:04:17] was there handing out the big stacks of money that we needed for buying off this epidemic, which is how I sort of feel we solved - we basically eradicated smallpox by buying it off with hiring tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of health workers around the world to do the grassroots work of searching for every last case and surrounding the cases and vaccinating and so forth. Those are two of the names, and Daniel Tarantola was there as well, and a number of other names that will come to mind I think as we progress. Dr. Sencer: What was your first impression of the Smallpox Program? Dr. Weniger: Well, it was remarkable in many ways. Obviously as a young epidemiologist still in training, technically, I just took everything for granted: that we would hire people on the spot, 15 or 20-30 people off the street literally, or the brother or cousin of somebody who was already on our team, pay them Seven Taka a day, and the nature of the job was basically assigned to search teams to go to this village, you go here, you go there, and then our role for the most part was checking that they actually did the work and when we went to a village and they said nobody showed up showing this Smallpox Recognition Card, we knew that fellow didn't do the work, he didn't get paid and he was fired. So it was basically a supervisory role of organizing search campaigns and of course once we found cases, we assigned people to stay in that village and vaccinate, guard the patient, pay money to the patient's family to feed them, keep them at home and vaccinate within that containment ring. Dr. Sencer: What were some of your most vivid recollections of things that happened while you were there? Dr. Weniger: After 30 or so years, one's memory fades. I brought some journal entries that I had written back then that I think captured more live what I was feeling. Let me see if I can turn to some of my impressions here. These are still on my way to the location, here's our welcome in Delhi on the 15th of June; Martin Jones from WHO brought us in. I do remember it was about 114 degrees as we walked from the airplane to the terminal. Let's see if I can come up with something interesting other than the details with the actual work in the field. I am in Narshingdi, we had our district meeting in Dhaka - this is 23rd of June, 1975 - I'm in Narshingdi, we had our district meeting in Dhaka this morning, ordered some supplies and already ate a hearty lunch at the American Recreation Association, courtesy of Finance Officer, Tim so-and-so, loaded the jeep with my luggage and took off. Roland and I - This is Roland Sipple - ...rode two Suzuki 80s on the two-hour drive through the countryside. What a thrill to speed along on a motorcycle past the rice paddies and lush fields of green jute with the sun setting behind one's shoulder and the clouds making beautiful formations in the clear, blue and pink sky. Bangladesh has the most lovely clouds, majestic, substantial and pure white almost like kinetic sculpture. We rode into Narshingdi under the full moon's light. What a challenge riding a cycle through the crowded hamlets and bus stops that clustered along the highway." Let me skip some of this now, and I can leave copies with you. Let's turn to 25 June, 1975. Yesterday a trip to Parkouri outbreak; today, we took a five hour ride in a dingy to two outbreaks down the Magoni River. Many forced vaccinations and a magnificent meal. Details to follow when I have time - Very tired, left at 5:00 am, returned at 5:00 pm. The village of Chardigaldi had no active cases, but there had been much resistance to the vaccinating team, so Roland and I split up to carry out what was becoming standard procedure, to vaccinate by force those villagers who have intimidated the vaccinators. These refusers are often the young, strong family men; but the surprising fear of seeing a white man with absolute assurance and calmness, walk into their home, asking to see their vaccination scar and ordering the vaccination, overcomes all resistance. Often it is the older women who try to run away, and whose arms must be grabbed and held. One man locked himself in his house. At first I thought it was a woman, since they are more afraid of vaccination and extremely embarrassed about being seen by a man. I told the resident supervisor to inform the person that if the door was not opened in one minute, I would break it down. Half the village was screaming at him to open up. Finally, the door was unlatched and I discovered an absolutely terrified man clutching his child. I tried to reassure him with an arm round his shoulder, but the fear in his eyes was unchanged. I shall never forget his look and the absolute terror that I must have caused him. We vaccinated them both immediately and left and perhaps the relative painlessness of it and speed of our departure afterwards calmed him down. Unfortunately this is the price that must be paid if smallpox is to be eradicated from its last stronghold among this illiterate, uneducated, poverty-stricken rural population. We were treated to a royal meal in the [inaudible 0:09:25] of the resident supervisor of a nearby outbreak in Chandwani. As several men cooled us with palm frond fans in the tiny crowded hut, we were served rice and curry, roasted duck, eggs, chicken, prawns and lentil chickpea stew. The custom seems to constantly put more food on your plate, unless you make a fuss that you have had enough. They seem prepared to serve Roland, Metteus[inaudible name 0:09:46] and myself enough for 10 people. After a dessert of Bengali spaghetti served in warm milk and sugar, of which I ate half, balancing my responsibility to be a gracious guest with my concern over milk that might have sat for hours; covered with flies in the hot sun after coming from a tuburculous[inaudible0:10:02] cow. Then we were treated to pan, which I decided I might as well try. Its sliced betel nut and lime rolled in a betel leaf and chewed for many minutes and eventually swallowed. After chewing mine about 10 times, I realized it would make me sick to swallow it and an unmannered guest to spit it out. So I stuck it in my cheek and prayed for the soonest opportunity to get rid of it. Within a few minutes that side of my mouth was numb and every swallow of the copious juices that were being secreted by my captive mouth was a carefully planned exercise in controlled nausea. Fortunately conversation was not possible with our interpreter chewing his pan and after taking a picture of this incredible repast surrounded by half the village peering in the windows, I was able to leave for our boat jettisoning my pan on the way. I think that will be enough for now and as we have some more opportunities. Dr. Sencer: Do you think you contributed anything to the eradication? Dr. Weniger: Well, I don't think I contributed anything in the way of new strategies. I was just another foot solider on the front lines, working in my assigned areas. Originally I was in Narshingdi with Roland Sipple from the United Kingdom and then the latter half of my three-month tour of duty was in Dhaka, the capital city; responsible for the southern suburbs on the island of Keraniganj in the Northern suburbs, and obviously I was just one small component of the procedure of the whole effort. In retrospect in terms of what we think now about how the campaign was done, I really wonder if we could have done it again in the same way. These days we'd have to have written consent forms and so forth for vaccinating and - Dr. Sencer: How did you communicate? Dr. Weniger: Well, I knew a few words of Bengali. You know, "Bugi ashanti ase[inaudible 0:11:54]?" "Are there any smallpox patients here?" But I had an interpreter. Dr. Sencer: I was thinking, how did you communicate with Dhaka when you were in the field? How did Dhaka communicate with Atlanta? Dr. Weniger: Well, we were in Narshingdi which is only a couple of hours away by ferry boat and motor cycle that travel, or vehicles when we finally had them. We did not have radios. Others who were more remote used radios to communicate back to Dhaka, but I don't recall having a radio to make - I'm not sure how we did it, it's been so long, we might have sent telegrams or just come in on a weekly basis. Dr. Sencer: You didn't have a cell phone? Dr. Weniger: No, we didn't have cell phones. Dr. Sencer: You didn't have email? Dr. Weniger: No email, no cell phones. Dr. Sencer: Do you think your experience in smallpox changed your career? Dr. Weniger: Oh! I think it definitely did. I think I was already focused on public health and coming to CDC at the time, but it certainly cemented that to be part of that great effort and so when polio eradication came around 15 or 20 years later, I was clearly quite excited about that and I think some day measles would be eradicable because it doesn't have a natural host and someday it would be nice if the world could figure how to eradicate measles. But it was seminal in that respect. Since that time of course, I have been working in many areas, most recently vaccine technology and have an interest in injection safety and I have realized that some of the practices that we did carry out in terms of the bifurcated needles, although we provided plenty of needles to the health workers, it's clear we weren't thinking or educating, or strict enough as we would be today with ensuring that every patient got a separate sterile needle put back in the holder to be re-sterilized, and it's probable that in those days we were effectively transmitting Hepatitis-B from patient to patient in a large degree. Fortunately, HIV was not around at the time and I think if it had been we would have seen the effects of it. But clearly it would be difficult to conduct the campaign today in the same way we did then, or at least it would cost so much more and would require so much more manpower and perhaps take much more time. Dr. Sencer: If you were in charge of the program in the 70s, would you have organized things differently? Dr. Weniger: I don't think so, and I am not sure, at the time I had enough experience to be able to see areas where it could be improved. Clearly we were working with difficult circumstances. We didn't have the fancy satellite telephones they have today for communications and I do recall that if you had four things or five things you wanted to accomplish in one day, whether it was buying fuel for your vehicle, or arranging some shipment of something, or getting to a village, if you accomplished one of those five things you had succeeded. I mean things were difficult in those circumstances. Dr. Sencer: Did you work with other people from the United States while you were out in the field, or were you the only -? Dr. Weniger: Well, for the first part of my assignment I shared the Narshingdi District with Roland Sipple and we lived in a Dak Bungalow, which is like a Government guesthouse in that town about two hours or so away from Dhaka. But for the most part we were working with interpreters that we hired locally who could speak enough English for us and who could work with the local population. I do recall that one of our missions was to publicize the reward for reporting a case of smallpox, and I recall vividly we had one individual who had reported a case. It turned out to be a real case, and so it was time to recompense him. I can't remember exactly how many Takas he was getting at the time or what its value is in U.S. dollars, but probably it was the equivalent of US$500.00 in his income situation and we made sure that everyone in that whole area, we had bull horns, and anytime you make any kind of noise, crowds assemble and you have 500 or 1000 people watching you, we announced clearly, this gentleman had reported a case of smallpox and he was now being paid this princely sum and that was part of the effort to get the public to cooperate in finding all these every last case and stopping the chain of transmission. Dr. Sencer: Did you get a lot of chickenpox reported? Dr. Weniger: Yes. Most of the reports we were getting were chickenpox and the big differential which we learned quite carefully was how to distinguish one from the other, and to me one of the key criteria was if you could take your thumb and push it over a blister or a pox and it burst and liquid came out that was more likely chickenpox, among all the other differential criteria. This was just a few months: this was June, July, August of 1975. The last case in Bangladesh was in October of 1975, so it was on the tail end of the epidemic. We had basically only one confirmed outbreak to deal with in Narshingdi. Dr. Sencer: Were you involved in any of the refugee camps? Dr. Weniger: Yes-the refugee camps were in my area of responsibility in the Northern suburbs of Dhaka and I do recall when we went to visit the refugee camps searching for cases, that the refugees themselves seeing foreign personnel, white persons, assuming we were connected to the refugee effort, would come up and complain to us that the responsible authorities were stealing all the donated food and other supplies for the refugees and they were not getting anything, and this was just a few weeks before there was a revolution in which Mujibur Rahman was overthrown and assassinated and it had been rumored that the amount of corruption going on in terms of selling rice, donated by other countries, on the black market or to other countries, was occurring widely, and that was one of the many reasons for overthrowing him. So I remember waking up, I probably have another letter home that I wrote to my parents after the coup in Bangladesh. I have to look and talk at the same time. Dr. Sencer: Did you ever have a feeling that you were in physical danger? Dr. Weniger: Yes. There was one time when we had a disagreement with - Roland and I with the storekeeper who wanted to charge us a deposit for some bottles and we discarded the bottles and all of a sudden a crowd of 500 people surrounded us and right outside the Dak Bungalow; and it's a such a populated country that we were really probably in danger of being torn apart for the disagreement with the shopkeeper, and so a senior official in the town brought us into the Dak Bungalow with the person who was complaining about us and resolved it with payment of whatever the value was of the Coke bottles or Fanta bottles that we had discarded; and it was not a danger resulting from smallpox eradication, but just from a disagreement; and we learnt quite easily, you've got to be very careful when you are a foreigner in a country, to avoid crowds forming. We were told, for example, if there was ever a car accident, if you are ever involved in a car accident, don't stop the car because the local villagers who are upset there wouldn't be any justice, will tear you apart and kill you-just keep driving to the next town and turn yourself into the district officer and if you have ever driven in Bangladesh, you know people don't pay much attention to vehicles, they are using the roads to walk and it's driving - Here's the letter I was looking for about the coup d'état. It's dated the 16th of August, 1975. Dear everybody: Since I have been here I haven't had a boring day and yesterday was no exception. At 5.30 in the morning I woke to the sounds of machine gun and rifle fire that seemed really close. Every so often the house shook from explosions, probably the cannons of tanks. Somehow I knew immediately that this was a revolution. The Sheikh's house is only a few blocks away... This was the Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of Bangladesh - ...and we guessed correctly, this fighting was the assault on his residence. It was really rather exciting standing just inside the doorway to the roof of our house. We could hear the bullets flying overhead, sharp cracking noises that seemed to come from the President's residence which we could just see from our roof. Probably 200 rounds were fired during the first half hour and about 10 explosions, tapering off to some sporadic fire for the rest of the morning. Bangladesh radio came on about 7:00 am to report the death of the Sheikh and to announce the curfew. Jennifer, my assistant, lives five blocks from the guest house... She was the daughter of a U.S. diplomat in the country and was volunteering to help us with the smallpox eradication. ...and awoke with a tank in front of her house. Amazingly enough the telephones worked and we telephoned the Smallpox Director to inform them of the fighting... This was Dan Foster. ...since his part of Dhaka was quiet, by calling friends around the city I was able to learn that probably half a dozen Government Ministers, mostly relatives of the Sheikh, had also been wiped out. Our first fears were that the Iraqi Bahini, a sort of private army of the Sheikh, not unlike Hitler's S.S. might oppose the army coup and fighting between the two groups could lead to a messy Civil War. But 36 hours later as I write this letter, things are calm and getting more relaxed all the time. During the hour and a half lifting of the curfew yesterday, I rode my motorcycle over to the house of a Bengali friend who knows a lot about the political situation; and she reported how the house of another minister was attacked and all killed except one servant that managed to escape. The streets were eerily empty, a strange sight in a city that is normally bustling with every imaginable form of vehicle, ox carts, rickshaws, baby taxis, cars, buses and hordes of pedestrians. Soldiers were posted with rifles and machine guns on strategic corners and the streets were scarred with the tread marks of tanks. There is somewhat of a holiday atmosphere among the people on the streets, since except for the deaths of the few corrupt families that were in control of the Government there is no indication of any other violence. Last night the city was as quiet as a graveyard. We sat on the roof watching the moon and the clouds, listening to the B.B.C. and Voice of America as well as Radio Bangladesh, the source of all the information. Military cars would occasionally drive by, presumably patrolling the curfew. This morning we received a cross-notification from another district that someone had died of smallpox after coming from a certain section of Dhaka. So we were faced with the necessity of going out to check out the information to see if there was any smallpox there. We heard that some vehicles were traveling the roads despite the curfew, such as diplomatic cars and such. So we decided to go to the smallpox office to organize a search team. We had heard that the army would probably stop us, but being internationals and showing something official looking, we would be allowed to proceed. So we put our U.N. passports in our pockets, picked the Land Rover that had the most official looking insignias, seals and posters on it and took our houseboy, in case we needed an interpreter for the three mile ride. I drove slowly and carefully and was fully prepared to stop if anyone flagged us down, but surprisingly none of the troops bothered us as we drove by the tanks and machinegun emplacements. It confirmed to me my long-held belief, that no matter where you are or what you do; if you act like you belong there nobody bothers you. At the smallpox office, we were able to learn that things were quiet in the countryside as well as Dhaka and that our radio contact with the advisors in the field is still in operation. By the time we put big red crosses on our car to look even more official, we found out the curfew had been lifted for three hours anyway. Old Dhaka where we searched for outbreak was as crowded and normal looking as ever. We weren't able to find any smallpox, but it will be necessary to send in a really large search team to comb the area in a few days when things are expected to be back to normal. I tried sending a message home to say I am alright, but the U.S. Embassy says they can only send general messages to Washington that all Americans are believed to be safe, which is probably true. This is a letter to my parents and family in the States. I expected that some sort of revolution in Bangladesh in a year or two, but was really surprised that it would happen now. Not that the Sheikh didn't deserve to be overthrown. He had appointed all his relatives to Government posts, which they used to rake in large amounts of money, doing things like taking the relief supplies donated from abroad and smuggling and selling them in India. He had also been bringing the country closer and closer to India and the Soviet Union and further away from the Islamic world. That is probably why the army chose the day of India's Independence celebration to stage the coup and indirectly slap India in the face. There is fear among the Bengalis that India might invade a la Czechoslovakia in 1968 when [inaudible word 0:25:10] Government crisis effectively ties our hands vis-à-vis Bangladesh interference. We are all hoping that in a few days the curfews will be over and our smallpox work can continue. There are only 38 known active cases of smallpox left in the country and it would be a shame if this political crisis prevented the success of our program. As it is, the WHO Director General who is due to arrive today to meet the Sheikh has cancelled his trip. Unfortunately the Government health structure will probably be in a shambles for weeks and this is not good for our program. I spent the afternoon swimming and sunning by the pool at the InterContinental talking with other foreigners staying there during the crisis. It's really a rather pleasant way to spend the revolution. I love their banana splits. Love Bruce. Dr. Sencer: Of the foreign nationals who worked at Bangladesh, I think there were more people from the United States than any of the other countries. Were you involved with people from some of the other countries? Dr. Weniger: Yes; we had periodic meetings in Dhaka for those who would get to Dhaka and we had Olof Ringard[inaudible name0:26:20] from Sweden. Right now I can't remember off the top of my head, I'd have to open up the small Pox Bible and read the list of expatriates that were there, but they were coming from many, many countries. In fact, many years later, when I went to Thailand for my assignment, my counterpart in the Ministry of Health was Dr. Pa... Koona....[inaudible name0:26:41] who was a fellow smallpox worker in Bangladesh, who then became Head of the Division of Epidemiology that ran the Field Epidemiology Training Program in Thailand. Dr. Sencer: The smallpox program was really a sort of breeding ground for many people who made a very profitable career in public health? Dr. Weniger: That's right, and I think that the Polio Eradication Program over the last decade or so has been the same thing for the next generation of bringing people into the field. Dr. Sencer: You think they are going to make it with polio? Dr. Weniger: I think so, eventually. There are some difficult problems in that there is virus sitting in test tubes frozen in freezers around the world from laboratories, and every last one has got to be found out. Another problem we face in our work is how to convert from the inexpensive easy oral polio vaccine to the much more expensive injectable vaccine which costs ten times as much; and so people - Dr. Sencer: In which you won't be able to use the jet injector? Dr. Weniger: Well, you will; and we are actually studying the use of the jet injector for an intradermal delivery of influenza vaccine. Others in Cuba and Oman under WHO sponsorship are studying the use of injectable polio in an intradermal dose which can reduce the dose by 20% of the normal dose, and that would affect dose-sparing and as well perhaps be a way to do it without needles which is a big problem. So we are actually working in our vaccine technology program on intradermal delivery with or without needles for such indications. Dr. Sencer: I think the fear has been, again of Hepatitis and so on, but with the intradermal you don't think that's an issue? Dr. Weniger: Well, if you are using standard needle syringe, there are many drawbacks to using intra-dermal. The Mantoux test is very difficult to do. Even here at CDC, I recall my last two intra dermal T.B. skin tests were not performed correctly by the nurse and if they can't do right here at Mecca, you can imagine how difficult it is in much of the world. But there are new technologies being developed for quick and simple intra dermal delivery that don't have the high failure rate of the traditional Mantoux test. The ideal ones would of course be without a needle, so you don't have the problem of potential reuse or the syringe or needle-stick injuries and so forth. Dr. Sencer: Anything else about smallpox you'd like to add? Dr. Weniger: Well-probably I will think of it as soon as we turn off the camera. But I think it represents in my mind what can be accomplished when the world works together and overcomes all the tremendous boundaries that existed. We had the Soviet Union cooperating with the United States across that terrible Iron Curtain and Cold War. We had all racial groups and political groups meeting together, and to some extent that type of cooperation continues to occur. We still have truces in various Civil Wars around the world to let the kids be vaccinated against polio during the Polio Eradication Program; and so it shows you what can be accomplished if people come together and set their minds on very difficult goals. You will never satisfy every possible objection, and there are those who also say polio can't be eradicated so why are you wasting all this money. But I think if you have the vision as Duff Hagee[inaudible name0:30:14:5] and D. Henderson and others who were the leading strategic strategists for this effort, it can be done and it will be done again with other diseases I hope. Dr. Sencer: That's a good note to end on. Thank you, Bruce. Dr. Weniger: Thanks a lot. * * * * * * Dr. Sencer: That will end the formal interview, but here, your briefcase there would you hold it up so I could get a -? Dr. Weniger: Yeah, well what this is: these were carrying bags that were given to all the eradication people. It is obviously WHO sponsored: World Health Organization; and this Smallpox Eradication Program. I can't read the Bengali but these were made in Bangladesh for the staff to carry their papers. I ended up actually bringing an attaché case with a WHO logo on it and it was necessary because we were carrying bundles of cash, I mean literally stacks of money. This was probably in the equivalent of their society; hundreds of thousands of dollars walking around because we would have to pay all these hundreds of health workers and one of the photographs there is payday, where we would sit down and we'd check if someone was still on the list and had done their job, and would get a stack of bills and that would be once a month. So I'm surprised we didn't have more armed robberies carrying around that kind of money. Dr. Sencer: I remember riding a train from Delhi to Patna with Bill Foege with a briefcase so big of Rupees. Dr. Weniger: And nobody knew what was in there? Dr. Sencer: Right. Well thank you very much, Bruce. That's a good interview. Dr. Weniger: Dave, you're welcome. Thank you. [End of audio 0:31:56] </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6D_EGPjPGHQ" 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 2008-03-31 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/15p68 emory:15p68 Subject The topic of the resource Smallpox Eradication Smallpox Eradication WHO CDC Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 6890520000 bytes video/x-dv Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sencer, David (Interviewer) Weniger, Bruce (Interviewee) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Centers for Disease Control Title A name given to the resource WENIGER, BRUCE Description An account of the resource Dr. Bruce Weniger served in the Smallpox Eradication Program as a short-term consultant for WHO in Bangladesh beginning in June 1975. Bruce explains how the smallpox program worked in Bangladesh and reads aloud from the journal he kept during that time, including a letter to his parents detailing his experience during the coup. Language A language of the resource English https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/a14efb4876e19798ed4188337823e916.JPG 135e6ef2baee7c0adf478b944437aaf3 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/2004fffab008be1051279b90bc2a4356.pdf 99ab9a0ed4c6bcf117145ae31a0fad4c 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> Conversation Dr. William Foege &amp; Dr. William Foege Transcribed: January 30, 2009 | Duration 0:41:22 A Conversation between Dr Mahendra Dutta &amp; Dr William Foege Introduction Today is the 9th of July, 2008. This is a taping as part of the Continuing Series of all Histories of Smallpox Eradication Program. Today Dr. William Foege and Dr. Mahendra Dutta are going to have a conversation. Both of them know that this is being taped and they've signed permission for us to tape and to use it in appropriate manners. Dr. William Foege: Okay. Mahendra, 30-plus years ago, we spent so much time together working on smallpox, but I never asked you, how did you happen to get into the program? Did you volunteer? Was this dictated? Dr.Mahendra Dutta: Yes, I did volunteer. I had returned from my training in Epidemiology for nearly 9 months back to the office where I worked with the Director General of Health Services and the campaign was being mounted and they needed more people to help in the campaign, and that's how I volunteered. Dr. William Foege: Ah, ah. So you did volunteer. Now, we've often talked about the top group of people. You, M.I.D Sharma, C.K Rao, Pidish, and so forth, an extraordinary team, but how did it happen that they came together, because I don't think you could have found a better group of people if you'd searched the world. How did that happen? Dr Mahendra Dutta: There was a continuous process of selection. People at the helm of affairs in the Ministry of Health, technocrats, were getting involved and those who could not perform they were quitting also. So ultimately the fittest survived. So that's how you saw them all together. Dr. William Foege: Ah! So this was evolution. Okay-Survival of the fittest. Now there was a person I was very fond of early on in the program who was running the program in Bihar. I totally missed the fact that he was extracting funds from us at an alarming rate. How did you pick that up and how did you handle it? Dr Mahendra Dutta: I got involved with the program in February when Dr. Dish[inaudible name0:02:49] asked me to visit and see how things are moving there because he was not comfortable. Dr. William Foege: This was February 1974? Dr Mahendra Dutta: February 1974, and in this visit, when I reached, I went to a district, Munger, there is a district by that name, where I spent a week seeing how things are happening. The reports we were receiving were that people do not accept vaccination; and when I went there I was surprised. Every morning we went to villages, we had a team of 20 people to vaccinate with us, and one after another village where we went, people were pleading to get vaccinated; and the stories that we got were: so many died in this village, people were really alarmed. They wanted vaccination, then the civil surgeon, the head of the health administration of the district was hostile to Dr. Sinha and he narrated me all those stories, how he is employing over and above the normal staff, some extra workers, and virtually paying them 1/5th or 1/6th of the money that they are supposed to get and the remaining is being pocketed. So this was corroborated by another colleague who had worked with me earlier who was my other class fellow in the public health training, and he corroborated that this is actually happening. I finally met the Health Commissioner at a very personal level in a club and told him. He said that this is no news to him. So then everybody knew-so I said then, "What to do." The gentleman said, "Well! I am not heading the health services. It is a technocrat there. He has to come. I am a bureaucrat. Then only, I will step in." It went on like this, till fortunately, let me say, may be you are aware, in 1974 May, there was a nuclear explosion in India. Dr. William Foege: I remember that! Dr Mahendra Dutta: Pokharan, and after Pokhran, the Newsweek in its front page carried a report, "Another Explosion in India" and this was the smallpox explosion in Bihar, when you will recollect that in our May search, we discovered over 8,500 new outbreaks with 11,000 cases. So - Dr. William Foege: In one week, 11,000 cases - if I can just interject here - The previous Fall, D.A Henderson had asked me, "What's the largest number of cases you will find in any State in a week in India?" And we actually took this quite seriously, and we concluded that it would be less than1,000 cases. So we suggested that they use 3 digits for their computer programming. D.A- always suspicious of us; added 4 digits, and then we had to call and say, we've had 11,000-plus cases in one week, in one State, and so even the computers were not cooperating anymore. Okay, so go ahead - then May of 1974... Dr MahendraDutta: Yeah, then the stage came that the government of India and the State Government, they all got really startled because a lot of journalists who had come to Rajasthan to cover the nuclear explosion, they moved into Bihar and started reporting. Now at that point of time, we were asked by the Health Commissioner there who was the chief bureaucrat in the Health Service. Earlier he took the stand that the Technical Head should come to me but now he himself went to the political head and told him that this is the problem that they want the Program Manager Dr. Sinha to be moved out; and then he was - a substitute was selected by consensus. He was a very good person. Everybody felt that he was going to deliver, and he moved in and then things moved. So after that, we had very fast track movements on the program. Dr. William Foege: I want to come back to this, but this has always been an example to me of an outsider not able to see what was actually happening and an insider understanding immediately what was happening. What else did I miss? Dr Mahendra Dutta: Well, you didn't miss much because even in this case, I recall you were believing that smallpox will definitely go sooner or later. I wanted it to be sooner. Dr. William Foege: Yes, Dr Mahendra Dutta: That's about the only difference of you. Dr. William Foege: So the reporters came to India, they did their reporting on the nuclear test and now looking for other stories, suddenly this becomes a very good story. Smallpox is out of control and they have no background to know that this is partly due to the improvement of the program and surveillance was improving and there were a lot of people now on the problem, but it caused Parliament to make life miserable for you because everyday they were asking for explanations; and how important was that in diverting people from smallpox eradication to answering Parliament? Dr Mahendra Dutta: Well, the group of workers who were handling at the National level for the Parliament was only being fed by the peripheral workers. We were not disturbed much in the field. In fact, we were helped by this lot of reporters coming in and giving the stories. It was a helpful thing because the Government at that time asked us to request whatever we needed more and we increased our efforts far more then. Dr. William Foege: What was Karan Singh's, the Minister of Health, what was his approach to all of that bad news? Dr Mahendra Dutta: Oh! He was the real support. He recognized that the disease is being tackled in other States and it was only the problem of inactivity in Bihar, that's why they were lagging behind. So he himself visited later in Bihar and emphasized that we put in more efforts and things were already showing up, and very soon things will be completed. In fact, we recollect that he all along was a big moral support. Dr. William Foege: So, at the very top, you had all the support you needed. If you go down a layer, to the Director General of Health Services, to Dr. J.B Srivastav, what was his role at this time? Dr Mahendra Dutta: Unfortunately he belonged to the group of unbelievers. There were people, I believe in every country, who did not believe that Smallpox can be eradicated vis-à-vis the others. He belonged to the other group and he was always pessimistic about our claims of eradicating it very soon. So all I recollect is that I had a very good liaison with him and he, several times, enquired of me, "Is it real what you are reporting-so good a progress in so short a time?" So that was the main thing he would always accept when I say so and I recollect when later we were so close to the endpoint and we were going in for announcing a reward for a case. The minister was to make that announcement on July 1, 1974. He was asking, "Isn't it too early to make such an announcement?" And I said, "Well the amount of money and effort we are putting in each day, I shall be so happy that if I can have all the remaining few hundred cases discovered by this reward and it will save a lot of money and time." It was a matter of chance that not a single case was found and we didn't have to pay a single reward but Dr. Srivastav had apparently not been at the most peripheral level, in the field level; that is why he couldn't appreciate how thoroughly the things were happening. Dr. William Foege: How powerful was his pessimism in influencing the Minister of Health of Bihar when they wanted to change back to mass vaccination. Dr Mahendra Dutta: He came to Patna on the asking of the Minister of Health and addressed the civil surgeons and at this meeting he pleaded that the ultimate solution of the problem would be covering backlog of mass primary vaccinations; children who have never been vaccinated. Unfortunately, the minister took it very seriously and wrote to Dr. Karan Singh, the Indian Minister for Health that your Director General has requested that we should cover the backlog of primary vaccinations, children who have never been vaccinated. He asked for money; vaccine and bifurcated needles for vaccination to harness a new organization, the block level health staff to complete it. Because Dr. Srivastav said he is not against the firefighting efforts that are being carried out. So Dr. Srivastav's comments were sought about the statement that he made and I recollect that Dr. Srivastav was uncomfortable how to respond to it and he asked me, I had to go back from Patna and I said there is an anomaly. They too are saying the same thing; that first we bring the disease to zero level and thereafter we can concentrate on the backlog of primary vaccinations which we never needed there, probably; and it was completed without the backlog. Nobody needed it. Dr. William Foege: Now you talked about the believers and the unbelievers. Do you recall the day you became a believer? Dr Mahendra Dutta: I recall the day when the non-believers were shunted out. I was responsible myself. Several of my Indian colleagues who came to work in Bihar with me in the initial discussions, they belonged to that thinking, though they were working and I pleaded with them, if you don't believe, probably, morally, you should not agree to do it. Couple of them did go back instantly, because unless you have a conviction that you can achieve, then you are not doing it. Dr. William Foege: The National Institute of Communicable Diseases put a lot of effort into this program. Did they take great pride at it when it succeeded; and did it make a difference in the way the Government of India supported NICD. Dr Mahendra Dutta: Oh! Tremendously; I believe they are surviving on the laurels of achievement of smallpox even today. That's the biggest thing they did. Of course, they did a couple of other good things after that but smallpox is a feather in their cap. Dr. William Foege: There were very many foreign workers and often times coming for three months and then leaving, and that's the most difficult, to get people acclimated in 3 months to get some productive work out of them and then have them leave. What were, from your point of view, the biggest problems of having these foreign workers in India? Dr Mahendra Dutta: Well, I recollect when they landed in Patna, they volunteered, many of them came through CDC, and when they arrived in Patna, they were very enthusiastic in performing. At the same time, probably, they have never worked in a developing country before. So they were also apprehensive. What we did was that upon their arrival, besides the technical briefing, a sociologist was made to speak with them; and this session attracted them the most. They had so many things to ask the sociologist. Probably, this was the longest session in the briefing in Patna, three to four hours, and they were told about the communities in India, how they operate and how they live together. So that helped them to know quickly, in the filed, how to perform. I recollect that the work to be done was so much that many of them did long extended hours of the day in the field. From morning till late evening, and we were always telling them that in the summer months, you should not be out in the peak hours in the noon but they were defying it also in the enthusiasm that they must complete the work before they leave. Fortunately, some of them, and they were good, those some of them; they asked for extending their period of stay so that before they leave they could see things happening and I recollect at least, a couple of them, Steve Jones and David Hyman; they were later on moved to Bangladesh but they stayed for about five months in India. So that was their enthusiasm to show the results. The small mistake that happened in the beginning, a couple of them arrived with their better-halves and they couldn't perform because field conditions in India were not so conducive for their wives to stay alone; and they did not perform well in the field, and subsequently we had to advice that anybody coming here must come without their spouse. Dr. William Foege: So you worked them so hard maybe 90 days was as long as they could actually take. We wore them out. Have you ever thought pf what were the biggest mistakes that were made in the program. If you were doing it all over again, what would you avoid doing? Dr Mahendra Dutta: I don't see back, anything wrong, the only thing that for this short program, as I said, it lasted hardly an year or so, and there were other programs that suffered because everybody was occupied with this program, but we had to pursue with those programs. I recollect that Family Planning was our biggest competitor as a program, and time and again, the people in the family planning were disturbed but we had to tell them that ours was going to last a few more months, and later on we can join with you in the program. Dr. William Foege: That brings up the question; if the National Institute of Communicable Diseases took great pride in this, did Family Planning take pride in the contribution they made-because it was an enormous contribution? Dr Mahendra Dutta: Well, maybe that was only after April or sometime in 1975 that the Family Planning was given a top priority during the emergency era in India. Before that, they had certain target approach and that's why they were more eager to perform and let not their workers be diverted to help in smallpox. Because in the smallpox, we involved every month, for a week all health workers for the search and that's what was disturbing them but seeing the results, they also agreed that we are doing some job and let it be finished. Dr. William Foege: You mention that it was in truth a very short program, at the time it seemed to go on forever. But it only took us three months to sort of come up with the system, another four months to perfect the system and then, India went from the highest rates in May of 1974 to zero twelve months later. No place else in the world was the change so fast, so dramatic, it's amazing in retrospect to even look at that. But then you went on from India to work in Ethiopia. Compare the two programs. Dr Mahendra Dutta: Things were very different in Indian program. We did not have the difficult terrain working conditions in the field. In Ethiopia, the communications in the field was so difficult, and here I recollect when at the end phases, every case occurring in Bihar, I personally went to that village, I could reach in less than 24 hours. But this could not happen over there. They needed a much prolonged sustained effort, and I was part of it that was done from moving from one district to another so that you make one area free. There, the people also do not move so much as they do in India; because here in the Indian program, fortunately, when our efforts were at the peak that was the lean season for transmission. The disease was expected to come down with the onset of monsoons but our efforts were peaking up further. So that's how we could come over so soon. Because around October-November, when the rains cease and people started moving about again, we were left with very few cases; 150 odd villages where the disease was present, and I recollect later in July, we had some junior teams, mobile teams, we stationed a team in every outbreak and these young doctors who were coming as medical interns, they performed so well because they were all trained, they were all relied upon, they were amazed at what kind of faith we were placing upon them. I recollect those who were bearded Sikh gentlemen, when I met them in the field, they removed their beard; I have no time to wash every day; and those who didn't have the beard, they were having beard, I have no time to shave everyday. So those young people changed the whole complex. Then we introduced the strategy of guarding the case which was paying dividend that the case would not be allowed to spread the disease to another place, around the clock, 8 hour shifts, watch guards were placed, watch guard supervisor was placed. The family was compensated that they can't go out for work. So therefore we will pay rent for the house where our guards will stay; so all these strategies helped in achieving a very fast disappearance of the disease. Dr. William Foege: Its nice, 33 years after the last case, to hear you talk about it and still have the enthusiasm that you had 33 years ago. What is it though that you would like to tell to young public health workers that you've learned from this experience that you hope you can pass on. Dr Mahendra Dutta: All I could say in brief was that in public health, community approach, your conviction, your devotion and team effort, that's what matters the most. The entire team of workers national, international, higher, lower level functionaries, they all worked like a very close team; and that's what I can believe public health team-effort approach-is pride. Dr. William Foege: I agree with you. I think that's the lesson of smallpox in India; that the team worked as a unit. It was a coalition in truth, and people lost their national identities... Dr Mahendra Dutta: Absolutely, absolutely. Dr. William Foege: ...their personal identities and it seems as though we made decisions based on everyone agreeing, I can't remember that we ever took a vote or had really strong disagreements. So it seems to me that it was a coalition that was quite unique. Now, I worry that we have lost the words now of people like M.I.D Sharma. You talked to him a great deal after smallpox eradication and I don't know if you have any message that you would like to pass on from MID Sharma or Dr. Pidish, or some of the other people who we don't have a chance to question. Dr Mahendra Dutta: I was meeting them till/[while] they were alive, and my only understanding was that they felt that the success story of smallpox eradication was also an achievement which gave them satisfaction in their life, and the only thing which I felt they wanted the young generation to follow or emulate what they saw was, the same thing as I said earlier, that devoted efforts, team efforts always mattered in community health work. Dr. William Foege: Years later, I had lunch with Dr. Pidish and he said something similar, that it was quite different to be on an Indian team than to be on an international team working on an Indian problem, and he said to me at that time that, "If you come back to India, I will come out of retirement," we will do this again. Dr Mahendra Dutta: I would say the same. Working with you was a real pleasure. Dr. William Foege: Thank you. How did you get into public health though? Dr Mahendra Dutta: That was a very different story. My father was a Public Health Physician. Dr. William Foege: I know, the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored him. Dr Mahendra Dutta: Yes, he was a Rockefeller Fellow and right from when I graduated from the medical school, I made the choice that I am going to study in the School of Public Health. I didn't waste any time. Very next year, I joined the School of Public Health. Dr. William Foege: Where? Dr Mahendra Dutta: In Calcutta in India, and then pursued the career through married[inaudible0:28:34] life, and I have no regrets. Dr. William Foege: And what did you do after smallpox eradication? Dr Mahendra Dutta: Oh! After smallpox I worked with the Municipal Corporation of the City of Delhi. I was their Chief Health Officer for a few years. Dr. William Foege: Your father had done the same thing? Dr Mahendra Dutta: Oh, he'd done the same thing too, and then I was the Chief Epidemiologist of the NICD for a three-year period, and finally I was the Deputy Director General for the public health work in the Ministry of Health, and looking back I feel very happy that I worked in these positions and got a satisfaction. Dr. William Foege: But there is something genetic here also. Talk about your son. Dr Mahendra Dutta: Oh, he chose it himself, that he wants to also be a Public Health Physician. He came to the U.S. He was a bit disgusted about the policies of reservation for certain backward classes, and he said that he may not get the opportunity in India to work in the specific field where he wishes to work, and he will choose to go to public health work and go to U.S. for training. So I said, "If you wish to go, its up to you." So he is working here. Dr. William Foege: Three weeks ago, I was at my final meeting at the Rockefeller Foundation and I was asked to speak to the staff, and I said: when people ask me what the Rockefeller Foundation has done, I resist talking about the Green Revolution, or the Yellow Fever Vaccine, or the Hookworm Program; I said-I talk about the scholarships that they gave to people around the world, and I talked about your father getting one of those to study public health and that for three generations, this investment by the Rockefeller Foundation has continued to pay off. I mean, it's just a wonderful story. Dr Mahendra Dutta: Very nice of you to say that. My father has left behind his writings of life and he feels the same, that I received the training in public through the Rockefeller Program and I owed a lot to repay it, and I have repaid it because my son followed the same, my grandson followed the same. So that's the same way he thought. Dr. William Foege: In India, how do we improve the number of people going into public health? You've done it. You've found it to be a very enjoyable satisfying profession. How do we increase the number of people doing this? Dr Mahendra Dutta: It has been a dilemma for all the years but I don't know how, but things appear to be going haywire now. More and more people are interested in public health. It's a big change happening in recent years, and I recollect that four years ago, a Foundation with the collaboration from the Harvard University was established to raise Public Health Schools in India - establish new Schools of Public. Medical Research Council also following the same example, they are also supporting establishment of new schools of public health; and the young doctors are also getting more interested in pursuing Public Health as careers. Unfortunately, so far the Governmental System doesn't create more opportunities or caters for public health people. But I am sure there are two ways of doing it. One is that you train the people and there will be careers coming up, the other way is you create careers and then you find shortage and then people will be trained. So apparently we are going the other way round. People will get trained and opportunities will be created to meet those demands. Already several programs, National [inaudible0:33:06] Programs have started creating posts for public health physicians at district levels and lower. So that approach probably is going to be there. Dr. William Foege: I think we are seeing a renaissance of global health interest in recent years and I am just pleased that we both lived long enough to see what's going to be a great change in the future. Dr Mahendra Dutta: I wish too. Dr. William Foege: Are there stories or things that you want to say about the Smallpox Eradication Program because, you know, we may never get an opportunity like this again to talk about it. Are there things that you want to make sure that people hear? Dr Mahendra Dutta: We have said a lot but the only thing I'll add will be that in achieving success, besides technical things, there is also an element of administrative tact, I would call it; whether you say diplomacy in the modified terms but we, people in public health, should use this more often and after all you have to work with your own team, and also this is the team in our system: there is a bureaucracy, there is a political leadership. So you have to work along with them and carry them with you. Dr. William Foege: I hope to make that point at our reunion that behind every public health decision, there is a political decision... Dr Mahendra Dutta: True. Dr. William Foege: ...and that we end up trying to educate politicians but it's a very labor-intensive sort of thing to do because the politicians keep turning over; that they have a limited time in office and that I now miss no opportunity to try to get public health people to go into politics. It seems to be a shortcut, more efficient, if we can get more public health people to actually become politicians. Dr Mahendra Dutta: I wish it happens in my country too. At the moment, we are facing a dilemma because more and more politicians are coming from another group, the group which is rather not desirable but they are the people who flout laws and more and more of them are entering into politics. A separate stream has come. Formerly, most politicians were coming over from categories like rich people, business people, like accepted heads of the communities. Now some bad elements have started infiltrating into politics. Dr. William Foege: We are years ahead of you. Dr Mahendra Dutta: It is worrying, not me, but it is worrying the Indian Government itself; how to get rid of these elements in the politics. Anyway, it's not for me to too much comment on that. Dr. William Foege: But that seems to be a chronic problem in many countries. Let me ask you one final question and that is, the remarkable contribution made by TATA for the Smallpox Eradication Program where you had a private corporation agree to work under Government rules and to use the same approaches and so forth. It now has happened with other corporations, MURK with what they have done with River Blindness and Glaxo Smith-Kline with lymphatic psoriasis and so forth, but that was a very early example of what TATA did. Has this continued? Do you have private, public collaboration in health programs from that TATA experience? Dr Mahendra Dutta: All I would say is that per force, we had to go for that collaboration because the Southern Bihar lacked adequate infrastructure of health from the Government side and TATA has had a very good infrastructure in that region. They have their [inaudible0:37:35] and coal fields and factories all over- spread. Therefore we approached them and they readily agreed because they were working with the people there where it was benefitting. I have seen that now it has become a Governmental Policy in recent years to accept that kind of - because the medical care itself is going to the private sector more and more; and government is only obliged to deliver public health service to the community; the preventive medical care, and in these efforts, they know that we cannot invest so much, so they are seeking collaborations from non-governmental agencies including the private sector. Dr. William Foege: Well, this has been great fun to get together again after - we have done it before, but till now at 33 years to talk a little bit about this, and I will say this on Saturday, but I want to be sure that it gets recorded now. How wonderful it was to work with you, what a hard field worker you are, that you never shied away from doing anything that needed to be done in the field, and you were just the epitome of deliberate approaches to solving problems, rather than getting excited when things went wrong, you would sit down and ask how do we solve this problem and so it was great to work with you then, and it's great to hear you reminiscence now. Dr Mahendra Dutta: I am also pleased that I'd worked with you, and in fact I learnt also a lot of things, but basically, as I said, our team-approach was the most successful approach. Dr. William Foege: Great-good. Thank you. Question from Audience: May I ask one question? Did he play jokes on you? Dr Mahendra Dutta: He played rings because whenever he had nothing - rather, he had something in his brain lurking to solve, he would have a set of rings how to unfold them. But I don't think Bill was that kind of person. He was a serious person. The best thing I recollect is he was a very good assessor. He could assess how people are performing and that's what we got from him; his personal assessment of people who were coordinating, who could survive. Dr. William Foege: But the ring story reminds me of an absolutely true story; where we were going to a meeting where another person had absolutely different ideas than I did, and I knew that because we discussed it quite often; and it was a 2-day meeting. It was early in the first meeting when I took off my puzzle ring and let it fall apart, and I just said, "Oh could you put this back together? He had had a puzzle ring as a child and he said sure. He spent the next six hours on this puzzle ring. He even missed the discussion of the issue that I was worried about where he would bring up the other side. We were passed on other things before he realized that the puzzle ring had kept him occupied. *** Thank both of you. [End of audio] </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pc6RzIlxjKg" 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/. Title A name given to the resource DUTTA M. WITH FOEGE W. Description An account of the resource A Conversation between Dr. Mahendra Dutta and Dr. William Foege, two of the key people in the smallpox eradication program in India. Dr. Mahendra Dutta, former New Delhi, India Health Commissioner Dr. William Foege, former CDC Director Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30333 www.cdc.gov/museum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 10, 2008 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 8928960000 bytes video/x-dv Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/16rk2 emory:16rk2 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/53da523d4271248d7d65d8b6a75dc881.jpg b32364351a5ca7f3b07fdf5fff40a688 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. Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vGm3xkyWv9o" 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/. Title A name given to the resource FITZGERALD, STEVE Subject The topic of the resource Somalia Description An account of the resource Steve Fitzgerald describes his experiences in India, Somalia and Ethiopia during the Smallpox Eradication Program as well as, an outbreak of yellow fever in West Africa Interviewed by Melissa McSwegin Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30333 www.cdc.gov/museum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 10, 2008 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) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 12417840000 bytes video/x-dv Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/16s1z emory:16s1z https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/2c6fb3841eba06514830b5afa9ab4e7c.jpg b5827d1853179cc0066bca6e00375bc6 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/f421a75005a3047326938af9b1370218.pdf b92bbc1092439c0b5f12d28f0f22136f 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. Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZXXH576_UWw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="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/. Title A name given to the resource MACK, THOMAS M. Subject The topic of the resource Smallpox Description An account of the resource Dr. Tom Mack discusses epidemiologic observations in Africa and Pakistan. Tom had not been part of the formal Smallpox Eradication Program team but has researched areas of smallpox epidemiology. Interviewed by Melissa McSwegin Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30333 www.cdc.gov/museum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 11, 2008 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) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 8188560000 bytes video/x-dv Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/16s23 emory:16s23 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/d6d8f6e0a7baee2ec152e3d916cdd917.jpg 9c82c9143b5028c1060873b6bb60a25f https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/14c20f3205f97b3b2a9a23136d88498e.pdf 271551e47c57078b6293465233fdef7c 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 Audio File: Vince Radke Audio File Transcribed: January 29, 2009 Interviewer: I'm Dave Sensor and I'm interviewing Vince Radke. Vince is an employee of CDC. It's April 1st, 2008. We're interviewing at CDC in the afternoon and Vince realizes that he's being photographed and recorded and he's signed the permit. First Vince in ten minutes or less... Interviewee: Okay. Interviewer: ...tell me about your early years. Interviewee: Okay, Dr. Sensor. Early years born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. Did my undergraduate at Michigan State University in biology and... Interviewer: Too bad. Interviewee: Too - yeah I know. Well, you know, these graduates from Michigan, you know. I always got to put up with them. But then after that - well while I was at Michigan State I put an application into the peace corps and about a year later I get a call from a gentleman and he said, "Vince would you come to Philadelphia? We'd like to tell you a little bit about Ethiopia and a little bit about smallpox." And I said, "Oh that would be great." Well the next thing I did, made a beeline for the library and got all the books I could on Ethiopia and tried to find out what smallpox was. To make a long story short, came down to CDC in nineteen seventy. They were having a training program for two weeks for the peace corps volunteers who were going to be going over to Ethiopia. So, the best, the best by far training I have ever had in my entire life was those two weeks here at CDC in smallpox. I had some great, great instructors. D.A. Henderson was one of them, Bill Fergie and others. It was just, just a fantastic time. Right after that then we flew off to Ethiopia and for the next three and a half years I worked in the smallpox eradication program there in Kaffa Province. Interviewer: What had you been doing before Ethiopia and after college? Interviewee: Well, right - I came in right in out of college. That summer is when I went to - I had just graduated from Michigan State. That was the summer of nineteen seventy and the - that July we were in Philadelphia for the first interview and then the summer I spent visiting some friends in Michigan. And then a call came in September to come down for the training at CDC and this was September/October of nineteen seventy. And then we were here for two weeks for that training in smallpox eradication and then we hoped the plane to New York and changed planes there and on our way to Ethiopia. And for the next three and a half years that's what I did. The two, it was only a two year original commitment but we were - I enjoyed the work. It was tough but I enjoyed the work so they asked me if I would stay for another year and I said yeah I'll stay for another year and then stayed for six months beyond that. And then came back and then I knew that I needed to get some more education. So I started at the University of Pittsburgh to get my masters degree in public health and while there I was contacted by D.A. Henderson and he said, "Vince we could use some help in Bangladesh for a short while." And I said, "D.A. I'd love to come," and so made arrangements and for six months I worked in the smallpox eradication in Bangladesh. Interviewer: In Ethiopia what were your main responsibilities? Interviewee: In Ethiopia we, my partner Mark Strosberg and I -- also a peace corps volunteer -- were assigned to Kaffa Province. That's in the southwestern part of Ethiopia and we were there to find cases of smallpox and vaccinate. We were told originally when we saw the reports that the number of cases of smallpox in Ethiopia, couple of hundred a year. I think the year before we arrived they reported like seven hundred cases. Dr. Sensor I think within the first couple of weeks we were there we had over a thousand cases of smallpox. We would contact, go to schools, go to market areas in Kaffa Province and we'd ask, show pictures of small pox and we would be inundated with people saying in their village or in their areas there was smallpox. And so we picked a couple of villages and I went one way and Mark went the other way. And so we were looking for cases of smallpox, recording them, we'd record each of the cases of smallpox, we'd record the number of people that we would vaccinate, names of the villages and then from there we would get reports that would take us on to the next village and every - inevitably we found some smallpox. So for the next about three years I did that. Interviewer: Was the work environment in Ethiopia a good one? Interviewee: It was good. We were - we had great cooperation all along the line from the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia, also the World Health Organization. Our two smallpox people there from WHO were Ciro de Quadros, Dr. Ciro de Quadros and Dr. Kurt Weithaler. They led the program. You were - I was assigned to the Ministry of Health and you had an official government car and that helped very much. We went out to the Provinces and met with the governor and the local officials. They gave us good cooperation down there. Sometimes they would supply us with a guide and a translator even though they trained the peace corps in the local language in Ethiopia or the government language which was Amharic. In Ethiopia you have seventy different languages and two hundred dialects. So each time you would go cross another mountain range or move into another area you would be in a totally different language and so we had to have a translator with us and a guide. So the government officials were very, very helpful in doing that. Interviewer: Were you married when you were there? Interviewee: No I wasn't. I didn't get married until I finished in Bangladesh. Came back from Bangladesh in the end of seventy six and then met my wife at the University of Pittsburgh and then got married in August of seventy seven and then shortly after that went to Kenya to work on the smallpox eradication program. That was the last stages where we were trying to document that there were zero cases in Kenya. Interviewer: While you were in Ethiopia what was the most gratifying thing? Interviewee: Oh wow. That's a tough question because there was - Dr. Sensor there were a lot of gratifying times. To pick one. To me I remember one village I had been in Ethiopia and there was a number of cases of smallpox already in the village. Some children had had smallpox and we vaccinated and got good coverage, good cooperation from the local chief in the area and we felt we had a good job. And so we left that area and then moved on, on to another area. I went back a couple of months after and I was coming down the road one day and here was this chief that I had met a couple of months before. And he got off his mule and he came up to me and he said, "Thank you very much and thank Haille Sellasse for bringing you because you had saved much suffering for the children by giving them the vaccination." So that made me feel great and just knowing that we were beginning to stop this transmission. That was gratifying that indeed this plan that had been worked out it was working now, it was working and there were less and less cases as we went through the years. It was very gratifying. There was one time I had been out for about three months or so and I had reported - in a two week period I had reported over a thousand cases of smallpox I had recorded. It was just incredible and I remember talking to D.A. Henderson and he had said that at that time those two weeks that I had reported he said, "You and Mark Strosberg and the others that were working in Ethiopia at that time in Kaffa Province," said, "you had 10% of all the cases of smallpox for that period of time," so that was another gratifying moment. Interviewer: In some countries it's alleged that undue force was used to vaccinate people. Was that ever an issue in Ethiopia? Interviewee: No for the most part. I remember a few occasions when we'd be in the market vaccinating. We'd go to the market. Usually these markets they had once a week in an area so Wednesday was their market day and we knew this. So we'd go there into the market area and we'd do a couple of things. One we'd ask for cases of smallpox and the other one was that we would set up a vaccination for those that wanted it. Sometimes the local person in charge, the chief or whatever, wanted to make sure that everybody got vaccinated so they would drag some of the people to us to get vaccinated. So in that sense that was - but it was very, it was very rare. I think it was more often that if people didn't want to get the vaccination we didn't force it on them. And we knew just the methodology that we didn't need to vaccinate everybody. We knew if we got the majority of the contacts that we could break that transmission and indeed that was the case. So it really wasn't necessary for us to do that. I know all the volunteers that I worked with in Ethiopia, whether it was in Bangladesh I mean we never forced people to be vaccinated. Interviewer: Was there a big contingent of volunteers? Interviewee: In Ethiopia I think there were thirteen or fourteen of us that went over in the first group of peace corps volunteers and then every other year cause we were on a two year cycle, another group of peace corps volunteers would come in to replace those that were going. In the second and third year we got some other additional international volunteers. Some of them from Japan, some of them from Australia. We had volunteers there also. We had quite an international group of people in Ethiopia and Bangladesh from I would say twenty, thirty different countries. It was great to see the cooperation and working with all those different people. It was really great. Enjoyed it. Interviewer: Do you remember the name of the Director of the Ethiopian smallpox program? Interviewee: Well that was - the Director for the program he was an Austrian and that was Dr. Kurt Weithaler. Interviewer: The Ethiopian one. Interviewee: Oh, the Ethiopian. I can't remember Dr. Sensor. I worked with - you know the Ethiopians that I remember are the ones that I worked with. The sanitarians, the dressers that were down in Kaffa Province. Interviewer: The Director of the program was the director of the control of diarrheal disease in nineteen eighty seven after the government had changed and it was unhappy situation. Interviewee: Yeah, it was, it was. I talked and maintained a lot of my contacts over the years in Ethiopia and almost to the person they expressed the time after Haille Sellasse as a bad time, as a bad time, yeah. Interviewer: How long were you in Bangladesh? Interviewee: I was in Bangladesh for about six/seven months from April until November and I think that was seventy five or seventy six. I can't remember now. Interviewer: You were there as a peace corps volunteer? Interviewee: No, I was WHO short term consultant. Interviewer: WHO then. Interviewee: Yeah, at that time, yeah. D.A. Henderson said to me at the time, he says, "Vince," he says, "Yeah, if you're coming I'll tell you basically we're going to give you $50 a day," and at that time I thought man that's all the money in the world. So and - but more so than that just to get a chance of getting back to the smallpox program you know. Interviewer: Where were you in Bangladesh? Interviewee: I was in Sylhet district. When I got there at the airport, Stan Foster, Dr. Foster was there and he met us. First of all we went to the office and then he took us to this house they had. I think they bought the house and it was for the consultants that were coming over to work on the smallpox program. And we had I think two days of orientation and then they - he says, "Okay you're in charge on Sylhet district." And so went up to Sylhet district and worked there for the entire time except for those occasional times we'd come back to Dhaka for a meeting or something. A couple of interesting stories there. Since you were in charge of the entire smallpox program in Sylhet district, you'd have to pay the vaccinators and translators and other people that would help you in the smallpox program and we had to pay them. So we'd come down to Dhaka, we'd have our monthly meeting or every couple of months we'd have a meeting and the other thing was to collect - get the money so when we go back we could pay the people for the work that they had done. Well the denomination in Bangladesh was taka and I forget what the amount was. I think it was like fourteen or fifteen taka to the dollar or something like that. So I'd have this suitcase of money okay and I probably had sixty or seventy taka in it and I'd feel so uneasy with the suitcase of money, throw it in the Land Rover and drive up to Sylhet district with all this money. And I couldn't wait to pay the people so I could get rid of all these thousands and thousands of taka that I had to operate the program but... Interviewer: And [inaudible 16.00] Diego was back in Dhaka worrying about the receipts. Interviewee: Right, absolutely. Receipt for everything. I mean you signed your life away you know, even though at times having the Bangladesh money, the taka there it sometimes was like monopoly money. I didn't really think it was real but I did want to get rid of it because I knew - for them it was very important, you know for the vaccinators and the other people that were giving us a hand. Well, a couple - I could tell you [inaudible 16.29] there are a couple of other stories here. Interviewer: Go on. Interviewee: One story which I'll never forget. I'd been in Bangladesh for a couple of months already and they had this - one of the problems we had was we of course had to document that there was zero cases. So any time we'd get a case of rash we'd try to collect this specimen, get a scab specimen from abrasions, send it off to the lab but we would still do containment even though clinically it might be chickenpox and not smallpox. We'd do containment cause we wanted to be sure. So we'd have to do that containment until we got the lab report back. Well, they had come on with a new test, a rapid test for smallpox which we thought was great because we wouldn't have to do the containment for so long. And so I collected a couple of specimen, sent them down to Dhaka for testing and they came back positive for smallpox and I said well there's no way that this is smallpox. I said this was chickenpox. These were two chickenpox cases. So I called up Stan, Dr. Foster and I said, "Stan," I said, "I'm sorry but they screwed up with the lab here okay." And I said, "These are not cases of smallpox, these are chickenpox." He goes, "Well," he says, "See if you can get some other scabs and ship them down but still do the containment." So I did and then a couple of weeks later had another case of reported rash, did the same thing and it came back positive again for smallpox. So I called up Stan again and I said, "Stan this test is no good. I mean we're getting false positives here. I mean I can't - these are clinically, these are not smallpox cases." He goes, "Yeah," he says, "Yeah we've been having some discussions about that here." He says, "But I want you to continue to what you want, to continue to collect the specimens and send them down." So I thought to myself you know what I'm going to send him some specimens but they're not going to be scabs of chickenpox or whatever. What I went ahead and did was to vaccinate myself with the smallpox vaccine. Once I got a scab - I vaccinated myself a couple of times in the arm and I collected those scabs from the vaccine and I put those in the container and falsified the records and sent them down to Stan Foster and they came back positive okay for variola virus. And I said, "Stan," I says, "You know that's vaccinia virus." I said, "That's what's on there." And he goes, "Okay Vince." He says, "I knew you were up to something because when you falsified that report the name that you put on there was a very common Bangladeshi name and I just knew that wasn't the true case." So later on that test indeed was no longer used so we went back to the old testing methods. The other story in Bangladesh that was, that I'll always remember was my last case of smallpox in Bangladesh. We had gotten a report that there was a person with smallpox on a public launch. This was a boat that would go from village to village in Bangladesh up the river and we heard reports that this person had gotten off this launch at about three or four different villages okay, but in one of the villages he had spent overnight. So we went out and visited all those villages where we had gotten reports where he had stopped especially the village where he had stopped overnight to visit. Well it turned out that the people that he was visiting were relatives of his and indeed from all the descriptions that we had this was a smallpox case. And we had gotten there -- I don't know -- maybe about a week after he had been there and there was a small child. It was a female, she was two or three years old if I remember correctly and the mother had told us that she had a fever and I go, "Okay." So I said, "Well we're going to have to keep you in the house and we'll supply you with food and water. We'll go out and get things for you but we need for you to stay here." And so we did that and that - even though the child had fever we vaccinated the child because we weren't sure if this was going to be smallpox or not. Well indeed it did turn out to be a very mild case of smallpox but it was smallpox. And a little funny story - and the child did well and recovered and everybody was grateful. But what's interesting, on the form that we had we had to put date of onset and date of discovery. Well, in most cases your date of discovery was a few days after the date of onset of rash. Now, in this case when I filled out my report, I put the date of discovery a couple of days before the beginning of rash. And I thought this is really great, this is good work. We're getting ahead of the disease. I said we're going to - we've got this down. So I was very proud of myself. I was going down to Dhaka to turn in my report to Stan Foster. He'd gotten my report and then he said, "Mr. Radke I've got your report here." And I go, "Yeah, I'm very proud." And he goes, "You've got the date of discovery wrong." "No that was the correct date." "Mr. Radke you cannot find the disease before it happens." I says, "Well we did." I says, "We were right on top of it." And he goes, "No we're going to have to change the date of discovery at least to the date of onset of the rash." So I had to change my report for the date of discovery but what was really important to me was at that point I knew we had gotten a handle on the disease and we were - we had broken that transmission then so that made me feel good, it made me feel real good. Interviewer: What were some of the main obstacles to your work in Bangladesh? Interviewee: Oh, the monsoon season was really tough Dave. It - and that was, for me that was one of the roughest periods because it was hard to move during the monsoon season. The rains were intense, sometimes the winds were very intense so you couldn't get out as much as you wanted and what would happen in Bangladesh when the monsoon hit, the entire land would just flood out. The rice fields and everything would just be covered in water and some of the water could be fairly deep, eight, ten, twelve feet deep. And the only thing you have then in Bangladesh were these built up villages and those were the only things that showed and the people couldn't - they didn't have a lot of boats so they couldn't leave the island. And sometimes if the people or the cows got too close to the edge of the water in these villages, they would slip into the water. And you would see - there would be bodies that would be floating, there would be dead cows would be floating down the water. And it was just - it was tough to work in those conditions, it really was. It was a really rough time in the monsoon season to get around and then to see the death as a result of the monsoon season. It was bad. Interviewer: How would you say your work in smallpox influenced your future? Interviewee: Oh man, it set me on the road to public health. You've got to imagine, I was graduating nineteen seventy from Michigan State. I got to put this a little bit in context here. The killings at Kent State had happened that spring and I along with a number of other students organized to shutdown the campus at Michigan State and we did okay. We shut it down for a couple of days and then the president of the university got smart, gave the school a day off and by the time they came back from school we had - the strike had dissipated. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. I thought well because I hadn't heard from the peace corps yet and I thought well I'll go into graduate school and continue with biology maybe work in a lab or something. So when that call came about to be a peace corps volunteer in Ethiopia and work in the smallpox program, I was excited. And then when I got into the program and to see how a public health program could indeed benefit many people, to me that was very gratifying and I have been in public health in one aspect or another very since, ever since nineteen seventy. It sets me - that's where to get my masters degree in public health and I've been at state and local health departments ever since I got back to the United States in nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine and now I'm in environmental health but it's still it's a practice of public health. So I think there was only a short six month stint in my entire work history that I was in the private sector. So it's always been public sector and it's always been public health so I haven't left it. Enjoyed every moment. Interviewer: Why did you pick University of Pittsburgh? Interviewee: I had applied to a number of schools and Pittsburgh was one of the schools and at the time I'd gotten some financial aid. They were the only ones to offer some financial aid and as a peace corps volunteer even though they set aside some money for you every month while you're a peace corps volunteer, it wasn't a lot of money. So I didn't have a lot of money. In fact when I got to the University of Pittsburgh with a little bit of - it was a U.S. public health traineeship that I got. I also got - had to do some - I had a work study program so that's why I went there. The other schools were a little bit more expensive so I chose University of Pittsburgh. Good school, good school. Interviewer: Did you know Dr. Cutler? Interviewee: Oh my goodness! Did I know... Interviewer: Yes. Interviewee: Dr. Cutler was my advisor. John Cutler was my advisor. He was an inspiration to me. I know some of his past but he was a true gentleman, a true scholar. He guided me on my masters papers that I did and I - I'm always grateful. And he was the one that I approached after D.A. Henderson had asked me to come. I went to him and I said, "Dr. Cutler I have a chance to work in the smallpox program in Bangladesh. Do you mind if I break my education here for a little bit?" He goes, "Vince take all the time you want. In fact we probably can even give you credit for it," for some of that and so I was very grateful. Stayed in contact with him and his wife until his passing but I knew John - knew Dr. Cutler and just a wonderful - just a wonderful man, just a wonderful man. Oh man, that brings back memories. Interviewer: Maybe we better stop then. Wow. Interviewee: You know I've been very lucky. I have met some of the top leaders in public health that have guided me and I just can't - I just can't say enough you know. That I've met either at the school of public health in Pittsburgh or in the smallpox program. It's just tremendous, just tremendous. You can't put a price on that, you can't put a price on it. Interviewer: The smallpox program brought forth an awful lot of good people. Interviewee: Oh, oh my goodness. I can't say enough about Don Millard, D.A. Henderson, Bill Fergie, Joe Breman, yourself. I don't want to embarrass you. You guys were just - were just great, just great. And the support, I mean Dr. de Quadros, Dr. Weithaler, tremendous, tremendous people. Larry Brilliant another one. I can go on and on. I could go on and on. I mean they're just - it was just - it was an honor. At the time of course you don't know it. Actually they're just one of the smallpox guys but later on I come back, it was a real honor and privilege to work with them. And you know Steve - oh I could go and on. Interviewer: You know Larry Brilliant had these tee-shirts made in Bangladesh that said eradicate chickenpox. Interviewee: Pox, right yes, yes. I have a shirt and I'll wear it when I come in July that my wife knitted and it has on the back of it, it has the smallpox target zero on it. So I'll wear that. Interviewer: You can still wear it? Interviewee: Huh? Oh yeah. I don't wear it too often because I don't wear it out but I have it hanging up in the closet and I bring it out occasionally so this will be - I should have worn it here. Interviewer: We'll look forward to it. Interviewee: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because she even after we got married she knew. While we were married we went over to Kenya for that last year for the smallpox program and she knew how important this smallpox program was to me. So when she knitted that shirt so I'll... Interviewer: You've been fortunate. Interviewee: Oh my God. Interviewer: Another country has been fortunate to have people like you. Interviewee: Oh. No, I am fortunate to have known a lot, a lot of good people in the smallpox program in the public health. And you know another story. I had - when I came back after I got my masters degree at the University of Pittsburgh I had also tried to get into CDC and the EIS program. Well at that time they wanted doctors and you had to have an MD or DMV and so I couldn't get in and I was always - I was always sad about that because I had remembered the training I had gotten here at CDC and the great people. And I thought boy what an institution to be a part of but I didn't okay. So I thought well you got to go on with your life, you just can't do nothing. So I stayed in public health but at the state and local level and that dream of getting into smallpox that faded until one day I got a call - I got an email from two colleagues. One at CDC who I had worked with on food borne disease outbreaks earlier and another colleague in Minnesota that I was working with and both of them said to me, "Vince there's an ideal job at CDC for you." They were looking for a sanitarian for their program there, the environmental health services branch. And I go, "Well." I says, "Guys I'm not interested now. My wife and I are in Minnesota, we're doing great." And the one guy at CDC who was an EIS officer said, "No, Vince you owe me okay. You need to at least apply here." So make a long story short, I applied and got in. To me Dave CDC was always the temple, the public health temple on a mount and so I'm so grateful to be here. Just so grateful. This is a great place to work. Great place to work. Interviewer: On that note we better quit. Interviewee: Yeah. </pre> Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kInVdz_LBis" 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/. Title A name given to the resource RADKE, VINCE Subject The topic of the resource Smallpox Eradication Description An account of the resource Vince Radke, MPH., describes his early life, his decision to join the Peace Corps, his work in Ethiopia and Bangladesh during the smallpox eradication programs in 1972-75. Explains how this changed his life and career path. Interviewed by Dr. David Sencer Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30333 www.cdc.gov/museum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 1, 2008 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 7336560000 bytes video/x-dv Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/16s37 emory:16s37 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/4dc6ef937719dd6fa6d83fd77f250dc9.jpg c4add24234d15f08afd1581c7c14dd6e 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 178 Width 184 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/683280d25992d65aedc92146052f9d32.pdf 8cb9282c57c5ecde06ed0cd89986795c 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. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:04:45 Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/310210147%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-71EQF&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/. Title A name given to the resource FOSTER, STANLEY O. Description An account of the resource Dr. Stanley O. Foster, EIS Class of 1962 provides descriptions of the working relationships he had with other people and organizations during the smallpox eradication efforts in Africa and Asia. Interviewed by Karen Torghele Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30333 www.cdc.gov/museum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource November 2, 2011 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/f2f26a6dd20ab344b90031f2ab88d350.jpg f2ba8e7c3ea456bfd6f16ff1ca4dca2b https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/35e4e0cbe1eb945418410dfb4594ca53.pdf 0633e9098537d49867bb7050d97e1576 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. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:37:40 Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/310213455&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/. Title A name given to the resource HENDERSON, RAFE & ILZE Description An account of the resource Dr. Ralph "Rafe" Henderson talks about his public health career at CDC and the World Health Organization. He and his wife, Ilze, who was a tremendous help to him and kept a journal of their travels and work, were primarily stationed in the field working on infectious diseases, especially smallpox eradication. Interviewed by Karen Torghele Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30333 www.cdc.gov/museum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource February 3, 2012 https://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/files/original/15e8d301dd03cde6351e6ef64c4069c9.JPG f8f95d813e144cc3a112d35f5f7b839c 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. Player html for embedded player to stream video content <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0QZEZHVKAI8" frameborder="0" width="560" height="315"></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/. Title A name given to the resource WILLIAM H. FOEGE & WILLIAM C. WATSON, JR. Description An account of the resource An interview with Dr. William H. Foege and William C. Watson Jr., by Don Berreth CDC public affairs officer on June 4, 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Bill Foege Bill Watson William C. Watson Jr. William H. Foege