CDC’s Disease Detectives Give First-Hand Accounts from the Front Lines of Public Health

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will hold its annual Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Conference April 24–27, 2023 in Atlanta. The event will feature 97 presentations on recent groundbreaking investigations and innovative analyses conducted by EIS officers—better known as CDC’s disease detectives. Conference attendance is free and open to the public, and the presentations will also be livestreamed with recordings available via a virtual platform. Event registration is required for attendance and will remain open throughout the conference.

“Now more than ever, it is absolutely critical that we continue to build a strong public health workforce that is highly trained, as diverse as the communities we serve, and prepared to respond whenever a public health threat arises,” said Leslie Ann Dauphin, PhD, the Director of CDC’s National Center for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Public Health Infrastructure and Workforce. “The dedicated officers serving in the EIS program deploy at a moment’s notice to investigate health threats, develop prevention strategies, and save lives, all while gaining the skills needed to become the public health leaders of tomorrow.”

CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH will give opening remarks at the conference on Monday, April 24. Other highlights include:

TED-Style Talks

On April 25 and April 27, current and former disease detectives will give a behind-the- scenes look at their experiences in six TED-style talks:

• Breakfast Fish, Boat Rides, and Bibis: Behind the Scenes of the Polio Response in Tanzania
• Putting Baby Booties on the Ground: Protecting the Most Vulnerable
• New Learnings from an Old Disease: Mpox and Health Disparities in the United States
• Three Islands, One Health: Capacity Building the United States Virgin Islands
• Perfumes, Pet Raccoons, and Mississippi Melioidosis
• From Intuition to Action: How Gut Feelings Can Drive Public Health Solutions

Alexander D. Langmuir Lecture

On April 26, Donald Warne, MD, MPH, acclaimed physician and scholar in Indigenous health, health education, policy, and equity will deliver this year’s Alexander D. Langmuir lecture, Engaging Indigenous Communities to Promote Health Equity. Dr. Warne is the Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health and serves as Johns Hopkins University’s new Provost Fellow for Indigenous Health Policy.

Media resources are available at: https://www.cdc.gov/eis/conference/at-a- glance/media-resources.html. These resources include outlines that can be searched or sorted by topic of interest for all of the work that will be presented at the conference, as well as photos of the disease detectives in action.