Collaboration in the fight against infectious diseases.

Control and Prevention (CDC) is an essential part, began as a humble maritime hospital in New York City. Its mission was simply to stop infectious disease from coming in on ships and spreading across our country. Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of the Public Health Service, another historic event has occurred. One of the great detective hunts of the 20th century came to an end. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Defense confirmed that tissue from a woman's body buried near the Bering Strait contains genetic material from the 1918 Spanish flu virus—the virus that caused the worst pandemic the world has ever known. This discovery will help us map the genetic structure of the microbe that sent a wave of death crashing around the globe 80 years ago. It is hard to believe today that flu could be so nearly apocalyptic. In just 11 months, at least 24 million people died, and most of humanity was infected. The infected often never knew what hit them; in the morning they felt fine; by night they could be dead—drowned as the lungs filled with fluid. There was no explanation, no protection, no cure. The pandemic produced scenes from a gothic horror novel—but it was all too real. In Philadelphia alone, 11,000 died of the flu in a single month. The dead were left in gutters, and death carts roamed the city in a surreal scene from medieval times. As the deaths mounted all over the world, orderly life began to break down. Schools and churches closed; farms and factories shut down; homeless children wandered the streets; their parents vanished. The acting U.S. Army Surgeon General, Victor Vaughn, calculated that if the pandemic continued its mathematical rate of acceleration, it soon could spell the end of humankind. But then, as silently, as mysteriously, as quickly as it came, the terror began to fade away. People stopped dying. The victims were buried. Life returned to normal. The great flu was soon pushed off the front pages and out of the public eye. When avian flu first appeared last year, we wondered if perhaps another pandemic had begun. An influenza subtype that had never before produced illnesses or deaths in humans now did. While it appears that the spread of avian flu has halted without the appearance of human-to-human transmission, the danger is far from over because the critical period may be just …