The recipient of this year’s International Award from the Kiwanis Club of Atlanta, Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,, faces on a daily basis the world’s severest maladies. Be they turberculosis, drug addictions, ebola and zika viruses, car crashes, smoking, polio, obesity — all of which he has been forced to deal with in his career, coming his way as global challenges that have to be dealt with ASAP.
The club gives its annual International Award to a person or organization who has furthered Atlanta’s reputation as an international city and its recipients include corporate CEOs, university presidents and local politicians.
Spoken like a true scientist, Dr. Frieden told the Kiwanians at their weekly luncheon downtown March 22 that in order to deal with these issues he relies on a strategy that is based on a “triad” on which he has depended throughout his career: “first technical and scientific rigor,” (It’s not enough to want to do good, he said), second, “operational excellence and accountability,” and third, “excellence in communication,” which he allied with sound political strategies.
“Public health is a public good,” he added, dependent on public engagement and community support.” But the foundation for his triad, he added, is optimism, a value that he has been able to sustain in the face of the most dire circumstances.
Dr. Frieden made a mark in the early 1990s in New York City combating a tuberculosis epidemic that had reached epidemic proportions and was a threat throughout the city’s neighborhoods, rich and poor, and populations, young and old. By applying his formula, he was able to foster public awareness and help improve public funding to control the disease.
Under his direction, the program became a model for tuberculosis control and his next assignment was in India, where he practiced from 1996-2002, assisting with its national tuberculosis control efforts as a medical officer for the World Health Organization. By the time that he left he was credited with having overseen 8 million treatments and saved 1.4 million lives by establishing a network of Indian physicians to help the country’s state and local governments implement the program and establish the Tuberculosis Research Center in Chennai.
He returned to New York in 2002 to serve as the city’s health commissioner and in alliance with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, took on tobacco control with once again coming up with a successful strategy resulting in the rapid decline in smoking rates through increased tobacco taxes, banning smoking from workplaces including restaurants and bars, and running aggressive anti-tobacco ads.
Additionally he instituted policies to deal with HIV/AIDS, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
With these impressive accomplishments on his curriculum vitae, he was appointed in 2009 by President Obama as the CDCs director only to have to face a cascading series of challenges including the ebola and zika viruses along with the age-old concerns of obesity and polio.
An unexpected challenge, he said, is the widespread resistance to antibiotics among the U.S. population. “I’m fearful we have a world of a post antibiotic era,” he said, where the U.S. is approaching the situation where it was before antibiotics were developed. The cause of this phenomenon, he explained, is the over-prescription of medicines including opiates that are being dispensed for pain and have become “no less addictive than heroin.”
As if the Kiwanians hadn’t been exposed to enough of the challenges faced by the CDC he was asked during a brisk question and answer session for his views on electronic cigarettes, which he fears may lead to cigarette addiction; decriminalization and legalization of marijuana, which he fears may lead to aggressive marketing with dire consequences for frequent users; car crashes, which he increasingly links to texting while driving and praised the work of the Mothers Against Drunk Driving; and gun control, from which the CDC is barred from advocating under a Congressional mandate, but which prompted him to call the U.S. “a real outlier” globally in the number of deaths from gun violence.
Nevertheless, he refused to become pessimistic about all of these challenges, pointing proudly to the eradication of polio in India and Nigeria, which not so long ago seemed totally intractable.
To hear the full recording of his remarks, click here.