History

Establishmentedit

The Communicable Disease Center was founded July 1, 1946, as the successor to the World War II Malaria Control in War Areas program of the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities.

Preceding its founding, organizations with global influence in malaria control were the Malaria Commission of the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation greatly supported malaria control, sought to have the governments take over some of its efforts, and collaborated with the agency.

The new agency was a branch of the U.S. Public Health Service and Atlanta was chosen as the location because malaria was endemic in the Southern United States. The agency changed names (see infobox on top) before adopting the name Communicable Disease Center in 1946. Offices were located on the sixth floor of the Volunteer Building on Peachtree Street.citation needed

With a budget at the time of about $1 million, 59 percent of its personnel were engaged in mosquito abatement and habitat control with the objective of control and eradication of malaria in the United States (see National Malaria Eradication Program).citation needed

Among its 369 employees, the main jobs at CDC were originally entomology and engineering. In CDC's initial years, more than six and a half million homes were sprayed, mostly with DDT. In 1946, there were only seven medical officers on duty and an early organization chart was drawn, somewhat fancifully, in the shape of a mosquito. Under Joseph Walter Mountin, the CDC continued to advocate for public health issues and pushed to extend its responsibilities to many other communicable diseases.

In 1947, the CDC made a token payment of $10 to Emory University for 15 acres (61,000 m2) of land on Clifton Road in DeKalb County, still the home of CDC headquarters as of 2019. CDC employees collected the money to make the purchase. The benefactor behind the "gift" was Robert W. Woodruff, chairman of the board of The Coca-Cola Company. Woodruff had a long-time interest in malaria control, which had been a problem in areas where he went hunting. The same year, the PHS transferred its San Francisco based plague laboratory into the CDC as the Epidemiology Division, and a new Veterinary Diseases Division was established.

Growthedit

An Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) was established in 1951, originally due to biological warfare concerns arising from the Korean War; it evolved into two-year postgraduate training program in epidemiology, and a prototype for Field Epidemiology Training Programs (FETP), nowwhen? found in numerous countries, reflecting CDC's influence in promoting this model internationally.

The mission of the CDC expanded beyond its original focus on malaria to include sexually transmitted diseases when the Venereal Disease Division of the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) was transferred to the CDC in 1957. Shortly thereafter, Tuberculosis Control was transferred (in 1960) to the CDC from PHS, and then in 1963 the Immunization program was established.

It became the National Communicable Disease Center (NCDC) effective July 1, 1967, and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) on June 24, 1970. At the end of the Public Health Service reorganizations of 1966–1973, it was promoted to being a principal operating agency of PHS. It was renamed the Centers for Disease Control effective October 14, 1980. In 1987, the National Center for Health Statistics became part of CDC. An act of the United States Congress appended the words "and Prevention" to the name effective October 27, 1992. However, Congress directed that the initialism CDC be retained because of its name recognition.

Since the 1990s, the CDC focus has broadened to include chronic diseases, disabilities, injury control, workplace hazards, environmental health threats, and terrorism preparedness. CDC combats emerging diseases and other health risks, including birth defects, West Nile virus, obesity, avian, swine, and pandemic flu, E. coli, and bioterrorism, to name a few. The organization would also prove to be an important factor in preventing the abuse of penicillin. In May 1994 the CDC admitted having sent samples of communicable diseases to the Iraqi government from 1984 through 1989 which were subsequently repurposed for biological warfare, including Botulinum toxin, West Nile virus, Yersinia pestis and Dengue fever virus.

Recent historyedit

On April 21, 2005, then–CDC Director Julie Gerberding formally announced the reorganization of CDC to "confront the challenges of 21st-century health threats". The four Coordinating Centers—established under the G.W. Bush administration and Gerberding—"diminished the influence of national centers under their umbrella",clarification needed and were ordered cut under the Obama Administration in 2009.

As of 2013, the CDC's Biosafety Level 4 laboratories are among the few that exist in the world, and serve as one of only two official repositories of smallpox in the world. The second smallpox store resides at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in the Russian Federation. In 2014, the CDC revealed they discovered several misplaced smallpox samples while their lab workers were 'potentially infected' with anthrax.

The City of Atlanta annexed the CDC headquarters effective January 1, 2018, a part of the city's largest annexation within a period of 65 years; the Atlanta City Council voted to do so the prior December. The CDC requested the Atlanta city government annex the area. Previously, the headquarters were in an unincorporated area, statistically in the Druid Hills census-designated place.