49. On the Case with a Disease Detective

Contagious Conversations

Your first day at any new job is always a little stressful. But for Julia Petras, the day she started working at CDC was especially high stakes.

In this episode of Contagious Conversations, we explore a mysterious outbreak that affected four patients in four months, sickened by a bacteria not seen before in North America. The FBI—and the public—wanted answers. We hear from CDC’s Julia Petras, Dr. Jennifer McQuiston and Dr. Eric Pevzner about how the outbreak was solved by disease detectives in the Epidemic Intelligence Service.

Episode Quotes

“There is no replacement for shoe-leather epidemiology. You can have all of your advanced biostatistics, your sophisticated software, but it doesn't replace the importance of talking to real people, to being physically there, doing some of that boots-on-the-ground detective work. There is no replacement for that.”

— Julia Petras, Regional Epidemiologist, Global Influenza Branch, CDC

“As a disease detective, you get to go and figure out how can you help protect people so that you can give people the opportunity to have healthy lives? And there's nothing more rewarding than getting to do that than as a disease detective at CDC.”

— Dr. Eric Pevzner, CAPT, U.S. Public Health Service; Chief, Epidemiology and Laboratory Workforce Branch, Epidemic Intelligence Service, CDC

“I remember I came in on a weekend to pick up some papers from my office and she and her EIS supervisor were holed up in a conference room with a big whiteboard, and they were trying to connect the dots and figure out where to go next and what questions needed to be answered, and they were always trying to pursue getting an answer for that case. And so the tenacity that was required to solve it was really impressive.”

— Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, Principal Deputy Director, Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, CDC

To watch the original 1979 interview with Dr. Alexander Langmuir featured in this podcast, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NICfQM9d0CM

For more information and full episode transcripts, go to Contagious Conversations.