America Responds: At CDC, Everything Rearranged to Put Anthrax Fight First

Late Friday afternoon, trucks and cranes surrounded the CDC placing concrete barriers on three sides of its Atlanta headquarters. The safety barrier, mandated by Congress, is one signal of the enormous changes at the CDC as it tries to respond to the ongoing anthrax attack. The changes are extensive. Labs have been commandeered; hundreds of scientists have been pulled from their regular work to the 24-hour struggle to contain the outbreak.

It is a different agency than before Sept. 11. "It's probably as major a deployment of people and tasks and commitment by us as anything we've done in over 50 years of history," said CDC director Jeffrey Koplan. In an in-depth interview for this article, Koplan described deep changes.

"We have a totally different organizational structure," he said. "We reorganized CDC's approach two weeks ago with a totally different mode of operation. We have pulled people from all over the organization and deployed them full time on anthrax for the foreseeable future."

About 500 CDC staff members have been reassigned to anthrax, compared to the several dozen who typically respond to disease outbreaks. The force includes more than the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the elite shock troops of disease detection. It takes in staff from almost all of the CDC's 12 centers and offices. One of every 17 among the CDC's 8,500-member staff is now working on the bioterror threat.

"The general community remembers Sept. 11," Gene Matthews, the CDC's general counsel, said last week. "Burned into CDC's consciousness is Oct. 4, the day the first inhalational anthrax case was reported. We are forever changed because of that." All of CDC's staff is working under higher security than before, many in secrecy.

The agency's communications office has begun rotating shifts on a firefighter schedule: four days on, three days off, 12-14 hours a day. In labs where there is adequate staff, technicians work eight-hour shifts round-the-clock. Some processes are so specialized, though, that only a few researchers know how to do them. They camp out in their offices, which at the chronically crowded CDC often means a cubicle. They prepare an experiment, take a nap, get up and read the results, set up another experiment and nap again. "Many senior staff are operating on hours that are less generous than when they were interns," said Koplan, who is a doctor. "I'll tell you, you don't do that as well at 56 as you did at 27."

As the agency on the front lines of the attack, the CDC has also been the target of criticism that the federal government took too long to realize the dimensions of the attack and failed to explain the dangers to the public. Privately, however, CDC staff say they were kept from speaking out in the early days of the outbreak by orders of the Department of Health and Human Services. They also said that the FBI had not given them full details of the contaminated letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. CDC researchers have not been able to examine the letters sent to Congress and news organizations, or the spores the letters held. Those remain in Washington under high security.

In the past few days, restrictions on the CDC have apparently loosened: Senior staff has begun to hold daily press briefings. Asked whether the past week offered any lessons, Koplan declined to speculate. "Maybe when we get time to reflect sometime in the future, we will find things that are correctable and fixable and helpful," he said, "but at the moment, that perspective eludes me."

In closing, Koplan said he sees only work. "Right now, we are working as flat out as we can. I keep thinking, if you know you're in a marathon, you pace yourself for a marathon; if you know you're in a sprint, you pace yourself for a sprint. But our guys are sprinting, and the sprint distance is long over. We're sprinting a marathon."

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