Founding of the Communicable Disease Center

During the Second World War a Public Health Service unit called Malaria Control in War Areas kept the southeastern states free of malaria, and for about a year of murine typhus as well. On 1 July 1946 its staff became the Communicable Disease Center, organized in Atlanta. The new agency occupied one floor of the Volunteer Building on Peachtree Street, with fewer than 400 employees, most of them engineers and entomologists, and a budget of $10 million. Its first task was to keep malaria from spreading across the nation, and early on it struggled to find enough trucks, sprayers and shovels for the fight against mosquitoes.

Its founder, Joseph W. Mountin, pressed for the center to take on all communicable diseases and to serve the states, giving practical help whenever asked. In 1947 it paid Emory University a token $10 for 15 acres on Clifton Road in Atlanta, the site of its headquarters. Medical epidemiologists were scarce until Alexander Langmuir arrived in 1949 to head the epidemiology branch, and disease surveillance became the core of the center's work for the states.

The Korean War, which began in 1950, raised fears of biological warfare, and Langmuir used them to create the Epidemic Intelligence Service. Its first class of officers arrived in Atlanta for training in 1951, pledged to go wherever they were called for two years. In 1955, when polio appeared in children given the newly approved Salk vaccine, the cases were traced to contaminated vaccine from one laboratory in California, and vaccination resumed. Surveillance of the 1957 influenza epidemic shaped national guidelines for influenza vaccine.

The center took in the federal venereal disease program in 1957, tuberculosis control in 1960, and immunization practices and the MMWR in 1961. It became the Center for Disease Control in 1970 and the Centers for Disease Control in 1981. The words and Prevention were added in 1992, and by law the agency kept the initials CDC.