Epidemics and Outbreaks (and Other Popular Books on Medicine)

[sharonking21]

(Edited for formatting)

I have noted that discussion on epidemics and outbreaks is of interest to many on this forum. I spent 16 years working for a state health agency, first as a statistician and then as an epidemiologist.

Now, you have to understand that the 'entertainment' reading habits of epidemiologists may, shall we say, deviate a bit from the norm.

Nevertheless, since so many people here seem interested in various outbreaks and other medical topics, I thought I would share a reading list with you consisting of non-academic, non-medical-school books I have read that are intended for the general public.

I thought these might serve as a resource for those of you who like to read about bio-weapons, epidemics and outbreaks, and medicine in general. If the title doesn't identify the topic of the book, I have tried to put the topic in parentheses.

However, aside from being a resource, if any of you have read any of these books, I'd really be interested to find out what you thought of them. Also, since just making the list took so much time, I cannot provide a "book review" of each one, but collectively we can do so.

Another question for you: What belongs on this list but isn't here? Please tell me--I'm retired now and actually have more time to read, especially my favorite genre: Epidemiologist-As-Hero-Medical-Detective.

Here is my list. Please add your own.



Ken Alibek, 2000, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It

Gerald Astor, 1983, The Disease Detectives: Deadly Medical Mysteries and the People Who Solved Them

Ken Baker, 2001, Man Made: A Memoir of My Body (Pituitary Tumors)

Rodney Barker, 1998, And the Waters Turned to Blood ( Pfiesteria piscicida)

John M. Barry, 2004, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History

Abram S. Benenson, 1995, Control of Communicable Diseases In Man (Handbook kept in desk drawer of most epidemiologists as a cheat sheet)

Antony Bourdain, 2001, Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical (From a cook's point of view)

Frederick E. Cartwright, 2000, Disease and History

John Colapinto, 2001, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (Botched circumcision and gender reassignment)

Alfred Crosby, 2003, America's Forgotten Pandemic : The Influenza of 1918

Jared Diamond, 1999, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Rene Dubos, 1951, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society

Paul Ewald, 1994, Evolution of Infectious Disease

Anne Fadiman, 1997, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: a Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

Elizabeth Fenn, 2002, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82

John Franklin and Alan Doelp, 1983, Not Quite a Miracle: Brain Surgeons and Their Patients on the Frontier of Medicine

John Franklin and Alan Doelp, 1980, Shock-Trauma (Development of trauma systems)

Uta Frith, 1991, Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Uta Frith, 2003, (2nd Ed) Autism: Explaining the Enigma (Cognitive Development)

Laurie Garrett, 1995, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

Laurie Garrett, 2001, Betrayal of Trust : The Global Crisis in Public Health

Temple Grandin, 1996, Emergence: Labelled Autistic

Seymour Grey M.D., 1983, Beyond the Veil: The adventures of an American doctor in Saudi Arabia

Jeanne Guillemin, 2001, Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak

Charles Hart, 1989, Without Reason: A Family Copes with Two Generations of Autism

Gina Kolata, 2001 Flu : The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

J. William Langston, 1995 The Case of the Frozen Addicts (Designer drugs, Parkinsonism, stem cell research)

Joseph McCormick, 1996, Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC

Jane Taylor McDonnell, 1993 News from the Border: A Mother's Memoir of Her Autistic Son

Judith Miller, 2002, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War

Paul Monette, 1998, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

Sylvia Nasar, 2001, A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (Schizophrenia)

Doreen Orion, 1997, I Know You Really Love Me: A Psychiatrist's Journal of Erotomania, Stalking, and Obsessive Love

Dave Pelzer, 1995, A Child Called "It": " One Child's Courage to Survive (Child abuse)

Dave Pelzer, 1997 The Lost Boy: A Foster Child's Search for the Love of a Family (Child abuse and recovery)

Dave Pelzer, 2000, A Man Named Dave: A Story of Triumph and Forgiveness (Child abuse and recovery)

C.J. Peters, 1998, Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses around the World (Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, Machupo--Bolivian Hemorrhagic Fever, Junin,-Argentine Hemorrhagic Fever, Hepatitis A and B, Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis, Hantavirus, Bioweapons

Richard Preston, 1995, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story (Ebola Reston)

Peter Radetsky, 1995, The Invisible Invaders: Viruses and the Scientists Who Pursue Them

Ed Regis, 1998, Virus Ground Zero: Stalking the Killer Viruses with the Centers for Disease Control, (Mostly Ebola Zaire)

Nicholas Regush, 2000, The Virus Within (Human Herpes Virus 6)

Richard Rhodes, 1998, Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of A Terrifying New Plague (Prion Diseases)

Naomi Rogers, 1992 Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (Health and Medicine in American Society)

Robert Root-Bernstein, 1993. Rethinking AIDS (Hypothesis that HIV doesn't cause AIDS--a crock but interesting)

Charles Rosenberg, 1987, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866

Berton Roueche, 1953, Eleven Blue Men and Other Narratives of Medical Detection

Berton Roueche, 1991, Reprint, The Medical Detectives (Everyday epidemiology, a classic, starts in the 1940s in New Yorker)

Frank Ryan, 1994, The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won-And Lost

Frank Ryan, 1998, Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues Out of the Present and into the Future.

Oliver Sacks, 1996, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (Neurological conditions: Autism, Tourettes, Memory loss etc)

Oliver Sacks, 1998, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: : And Other Clinical Tales (Neurological deficits)

Oliver Sacks, 1999, Migraine

Oliver Sacks, 1995, Reprint, Awakenings (Sleeping sickness and Parkinsonism)

Robert Sapolsky, 1998, The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament

Peter A. Selwyn, MD, 2000, Surviving the Fall: The Personal Journey of an AIDS Doctor

Richard Selzer M.D., 1979, Confessions of a Knife (Surgery residency)

Richard Selzer M.D., 1994, Down From Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age (Autobiography leading to medical School)

Richard Selzer M.D., 1995, Raising the Dead: A Doctor's Encounter with His Own Mortality (Near-death experience, Coma)

Randy Shilts, 1987, And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (Classic)

Ashbel Smith, 1951, Yellow Fever in Galveston, Republic of Texas, 1839

Darold A. Treffert, MD, 1989 Extraordinary People: Understanding 'Idiot Savants'

Abraham Verghese, 1999, The Tennis Partner (Drug addiction)

Donna Williams, 1992, Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic

Donna Williams, 1995, Somebody Somewhere: Breaking Free from the World of Autism

[NMDemDist2]

1. i'm currently reading

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

only into about chapter 3 so far

i'll let ya know

[sharonking21]

2. This is one of my favorites

(I even read the footnotes). Laurie Garrett came out with a memo recently blasting Newsday, her former employer, and the state of current journalism. Not sure I have a link, but if I can find one I will post it here.

[NMDemDist2]

3. great!! I got it at the thrift store the other day

i haven't done much recreational reading since the primaries but this book leapt into my cart and I'm enjoying it so far (meaning I'm actually reading it LOL)

[sharonking21]

4. Here is the link and some of the memo

http://poynter.org/forum/?id=memos

(Go close to bottom of page)

Laurie Garrett's memo to Newsday colleagues
2/28/2005 11:47:08 AM

Dear Newsday Friends and Colleagues, On March 8th -- International Women's Day -- my leave of absence from Newsday ends. I will not be returning to the paper, largely because my work at the Council on Foreign Relations has proven to be the most exciting challenge of my life. But you have been through so much pain and difficulty over the last year, all of which I monitored closely and with considerable concern, that I don't want to disappear from the Newsday scene without saying a few words. Indulge me.

Ever since the Chandler Family plucked Mark Willes from General Foods, placing him at the helm of Times Mirror with a mandate to destroy the institutions in ways that would boost dividends, journalism has suffered at Newsday. The pain of the last year actually began a decade ago: the sad arc of greed has finally hit bottom. The leaders of Times Mirror and Tribune have proven to be mirrors of a general trend in the media world: They serve their stockholders first, Wall St. second and somewhere far down the list comes service to newspaper readerships. In 1996 I personally confronted Willes on that point, and he publicly confirmed that the new regime was one in which even the number of newspapers sold was irrelevant, so long as stock returns continued to rise.

The deterioration we experienced at Newsday was hardly unique. All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions. Long gone are the days of fast-talking, whiskey-swilling Murray Kempton peers eloquently filling columns with daily dish on government scandals, mobsters and police corruption. The sort of in-your-face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity. When I started out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person's apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they'd found and told the truth. If they hadn't been reporters most of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It was just that way.

Now the blue collar has been fully replaced by white ones in America's newsrooms, everybody has college degrees. The "His Girl Friday" romance of the newshound is gone. All too many journalists seem to mistake scandal mongering for tenacious investigation, and far too many aspire to make themselves the story. When I think back to the old fellows who were retiring when I first arrived at Newsday – guys (almost all of them were guys) who had cop brothers and fathers working union jobs – I suspect most of them would be disgusted by what passes today for journalism. Theirs was not a perfect world --- too white, too male, seen through a haze of cigarette smoke and Scotch – but it was an honest one rooted in mid-20th Century American working class values.

. . . .

[sharonking21]

10. . .leapt into my cart. .

I know the phenomenon all too well. It kind of reminds me of the old Far Side cartoon of the woman holding on to a parking meter sideways while the chocolate store is trying to suck her in.

[Sufi Marmot]

8. That's sitting on the top of my "to read" stack...

I'm have been meaning to read it for a long time and am looking forward to it...

[CAG]

5. "And the band played on" is a must for anyone interested in ID

I've given it out as christmas presents to some of my residents.
Also, I've read most of Laurie Garretts "betrayal of trust" book; parts of it just weren't of interest to me so I didn't read all of the 800 pages. I guess I ought to sit down and read her other one; I've heard some good reviews of it.

Anyone read anything by Paul Farmer, the Harvard public health MD who has opened TB clinics in Haiti and other areas?

Also, a little off topic, but the last health related book I read was Marcia Angell's "The truth about drug companies." Very thorough and fair (too fair) critique; her solutions were a bit naive, though. Recommended to any who still think that drug companies have any shred of honesty or compassion (don't fool yourselves)

[sharonking21]

6. Yes, it is a must

I was an HIV/STD epidemiologist and I share your assessment--I gave copies of it to new employees.

I haven't heard of the other two books, but I'm glad you told me about them--I will look for them.

I was at the International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver in 1996 when the information on new drug therapies was released. I also got to watch "Act-UP" trash the booths of the major drug companies during demonstrations.

[Sufi Marmot]

7. Thank you for posting this - here's a few more...

1) Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill Amazon link Interesting analysis of plagues and their effect on history, originally written before molecular biology era so often speculative.

2) Bioterrorism and Biocrimes: The Illicit Use of Biological Agents Since 1900 by W. Seth Carus
Amazon link Thorough survey of bioterrorism cases, written before 2001 anthrax attacks.

[sharonking21]

9. Thanks, for both the books and the links

I can see that this conversation may, uh, do more damage to my credit card's status overchargus.

Amazon is one of my downfalls.

[Sufi Marmot]

11. My pleasure...

Your list hit a number of books that I've either read or are sitting in my "to read" pile, which is growing all the time, but I see some I haven't read that look interesting...I have the same "problem" that you do... :-)

-SM, who should probably have a portion of his paycheck directly turned over to various booksellers...

[MountainLaurel]

12. Another one, on genetically modified food

Seeds of Deception

[sharonking21]

13. My ignorance of genetically modified crops

is unfortunately abundant, but I need to remedy that. Thanks for the post. I note that one of the reviews says that the author presents a one-sided view but also that such a view is needed to balance out the thoroughly positive views presented in other books.

Sometimes it seems to me we have adopted the adversarial system of book publishing, much like the legal system. Not sure if this is good or bad. But it makes me have to read more books to get a complete sense of things (Ha! See, I can ascribe my bibliophile and wastrel habits to "the system"--the devil made me do it).

[CAG]

14. I found another one I was looking for...

"The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of AIDS"
by Elinor Burkett

This was kind of a follow-up to the Shilts book, exploring more of the social and cultural issues. I actually found this book a little more readable than the Shilts book, but both are excellent.

[sharonking21]

15. Thanks, CAG

I will look for it.

I've thought of another one too, an entire book about Lassa, but am trying to track it down--can't remember the name till I hit on it again. It was one of the earliest books I read on this kind of thing.

[sharonking21]

16. Fever! by John Grant Fuller

Published in 1974 by The Readers Digest as part of a series of full-length books. Lassa Fever in Nigeria. This is the one I was thinking of above but could not remember the name of.

[sldavis]

17. Yay! another ID-epi geek

Looking over your list, I have about half of these books. There are two more I'd recommend to you. On the basis of what you've already listed, I think you'd enjoy them.

The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat : The Story of the Penicillin Miracle by Eric Lax - tells the story of how penicillin was developed from a little more human perspective than the usual myth

Powerful Medicines : The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs by Jerry Avorn - this is much more about pharmacoepidemiology (my focus), but an honest description of the prescription drug industry

[sharonking21]

19. Yes, I'm so glad to find you too

and those two books look like good ones! Thank you.

[Sufi Marmot]

18. I just thought of one more...

"A Journal of the Plague Year", by Daniel Defoe (the same guy who wrote Robinson Crusoe). Amazon link

Historical fiction account of the London plague of 1665.

[sharonking21]

20. Oh, for sure...

I keep a log of books read (although it is painfully incomplete because my interest in actually keeping it waxes and wanes).

Anyway, I went to the non-fiction part of my log to compile the list above. But there are some really good fiction accounts of plagues and epidemics etc and they should not be left out. This is one of the foremost examples.

I also like Ann Benton's current books, lets see, I'm operating from memory here but I think their names are Burning Road and The Plague Years. They are interesting not only from a storyline point of view but also because she illustrates a semi-fascist response on the part of governments (and populace) after an outbreak of great magnitude.

And although not fiction, I left out Samuel Pepys diaries and the diaries and journals of Boswell and Johnson. Pepys has quite a few items about the plague (and on the great fire of London), Boswell has accounts of getting gonorrhea, and the journal about Johnson's and Boswell's trip to the Hebrides includes an account of how they introduce some kind of respiratory disease to the population of an isolated island.

You have to love these accounts for themselves in order to read them, because they are voluminous, but here and there you get a real picture of disease in earlier centuries.

Pepys had an operation to remove bladder stones (before anesthesia or antibiotics, of course) and he held a big party each year on the anniversary of his surgery to celebrate his survival and the relief of the pain.

[Tangledog]

21. I'd recommend Oliver Sacks to anybody

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat moved me in a way different from any other book I've ever read. It is a series of case studies of people with very unusual neurological disorders. The most memorable one, to me, was about a sailor who went on a bender; something happened, and he was unable to retain a memory of anything that happened since then, just some ghostly traces. He'd heard the name "Kennedy", for instance, but to him Roosevelt was the last president he'd ever recognize. He could carry on conversations, but couldn't remember who he was talking to for more than a few seconds.

Some of the neurology described is even more garish. But in an unexplainable way, I got an even deeper respect for the workings of the human mind. I think that Dr. Sacks communicates such deep empathy with his subjects, and such a contagiously relentless curiosity about the intricacies of neurology, that I couldn't help but be caught up in the inexplicable humanity of it all.

[Tangledog]

22. Not quite epidemiology, but...

Memory's Ghost, by Philip J. Hilts, may belong here.

In the 1950s, I believe it was, a surgeon in Hartford performed an outlandish number of frontal lobotomies. The aftermath is described in the person of a man we know only as Henry, who lost most of his memory due to one of these and has spent his life in a sheltered environment, knowing that he is interesting to the legions of researchers who come to visit, but never knowing quite why. I don't have my book journal notes on this title, but I remember it as discussing the nature of memory and the farther reaches of medical over-confidence.

The Man Who Tasted Shapes, by Richard Cytowic, is about synesthesia, an unusual form of cognition in which the various senses overlap with one another. It's hard to describe. I know I've experienced this to a slight extent, as some music is forever associated with colors (John Coltrane is reddish-brown when he's playing the tenor, but his soprano sax sounds orange). If certain words bring back images of favorite foods from your childhood, you get the idea. Cytowic is perhaps a more purely "clinical" writer than Oliver Sacks, without that emotional expansiveness, but this neurological phenomenon has fascinating implications.

Thanks for starting this thread, sharonking21! I've been on an early American history kick for a couple of years, but you remind me of how some of my most intense reading has indeed been medical.

[sharonking21]

23. I am so glad you joined the discussion

As you can see, I too like Oliver Sacks. I became interested in neurology and immunology after I was diagnosed with mild relapsing-remitting MS back in 1989 and I voraciously started looking for books like Sacks's. (So far--keep fingers crossed--the MS has given me only minor problems, luckily, but it spawned a kind of cottage industry in keeping me supplied with relevant reading material).

But those books you mentioned sound really really interesting and I will definitely look for them. As to the second one, I don't mind a more clinical approach--anyone who has, as a novice, gone through the misery of starting to read and try to interpret the Journal of Immunology :)cannot be easily frightened.

If you haven't already read it and like early American history I would recommend the book on smallpox by Elizabeth Fenn. A lot of it traces smallpox epidemics among different American Indian tribes but it also follows a lot of outbreaks amongst us late-comer populations.

[Tangledog]

25. I've seen that one

Connecticut and Rhode Island libraries are my friends when it comes to early Americana. The book by Fenn got pretty wide distribution around here.

[sharonking21]

24. I just went to Goodwill on a hunting trip

and found one not mentioned here

Plague Wars: The Terrifying Reality of Biological Warfare by Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg (1999). I'll let you know what I think after I'm through with it.

Goodwill has opened a used book shop not over 8 blocks from me and their prices are even better than Half-Price Books. $1.99 for any paperback book, including the big kind I normally get through Quality Paperback Books.

[sharonking21]

26. I finished this book

and although it is dated (published in 1999) it is worth reading just for the political history of bioweapons. It starts off with a scenario from one of the war games--that part is VERY dated since it assumes Iraq has bioweapons.

However, after that it gets much better, going through the different politics of things surrounding bioweapons over the years--I found that very interesting. The story of the first bioweapons treaty during the Nixon years is worth note particularly.

Also, it points out how terribly unverifiable anything is that is said by anyone on any side concerning these--and in my opinion it has gotten only worse since Iraq because the US government has put a pall upon scientific discussion of such.

I did not know--although it should have occurred to me--that the best weapons inspectors for bioweapons with UNSCOM have been people who formerly worked on bioweapons programs. Since the "weapons" themselves are so easy to hide or do away with with a little heat or bleach, inspectors have to rely on their knowledge of what it takes to produce weaponized bugs.

It has compelling potted biographies of weapons inspectors, including David Kelly from Britain (before he committed suicide after saying to BBC that the war intelligence was "sexed up") and a summary of Scott Ritter's tenure which depicts him as kind of having a John Wayne complex and being, shall we say, less than diplomatic but which also says he never, ever lies.

They rely a lot on interviews with unnamed government officials and on three named Soviet defectors--among them Ken Alibek.

There is also a rather chilling yet telling account of the various attempts by the Aum Shinriki sect in Japan--before they finally managed to kill people in the Tokyo subway. It is chilling in that they made so many unnoticed but serious attempts before that; it is telling in that it demonstrates how hard it is, even with the best of equipment, to 'get it right' to where you actually end up killing people.

The chapters on Rhodesia and South Africa are also noteworthy. I had barely heard reference to these at the time of the Hatfill investigation, but this really goes into them.

[HuckleB]

27. A few recs on the brain...

Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of The Genome --
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195167287/ref=pd_sim_b_2/002-7070178-2351221?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought --
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465044050/ref=pd_sim_b_5/002-7070178-2351221?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

Better Than Prozac: Creating The Next Generation Of Psychiatric Drugs --
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019517979X/qid=1115651092/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/002-7070178-2351221

The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach --
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0974707708/ref=pd_sim_b_3/002-7070178-2351221?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance


Yes, the links are to Amazon. Please buy them, if you so choose, where you feel most comfortable purchasing books. I actually checked these out from the library.

[sharonking21]

28. Thank you for posting these

I am going to really look for the latter one by Koch. To me it looks the most interesting of all, although all look worthwhile--perhaps because Oliver Sacks has such good things to say about it and I like Sacks's books. I'm not going to order new from Amazon due to the $45 price tag but perhaps I can find it at the library or a used bookshop.

The high price reminded me of a funny story. When I was studying British History and working on my minor orals, I had a real lust for a (even back then) really expensive book called Abstract of British Historical Statistics. But it cost $98 and I couldn't afford it on my grad student tiny salary and loans.

I told my boyfriend about wanting it so, lo and behold, when we went to his mother's house in Georgia for Christmas (I hadn't met her before) wrapped up under the tree was a nice book for me from him--the very one I wanted.

I naturally let everyone know how happy I was to get it. His mother, a few minutes later, sauntered over to give it a look, opened it and thumbed through the columns and columns of time series on wheat exports in the 1800s and the like, got a little frown between her eyes, gave me a perplexed look as if he had been giving me pornography, and said "Mmmm. Looks a bit dry."

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

29. Love this list! I have always pictured myself in a white lab coat

scowling as an assistant lays a fax on my desk, whereupon I jump up and place yet another thumbtack into the wall map and say, "this thing is spreading out of control!! Get me the CDC ASAP!" So I always read plague and pestilance books - they appeal to a morbid streak. Your list should keep me going for quite awhile. My all time favorite is DeFoe's Journal of the Plague Year.

[sharonking21]

30. Tell us if we have missed something

on the list that would be good. As to:

"this thing is spreading out of control!! Get me the CDC ASAP!"

In real life it is not quite that dramatic. (However, in a dry professional way--you certainly try to make it sound like that when you apply to CDC for grant money.) I was a state health department epidemiologist in HIV, which really was spreading out of control. Part of my job was to act as project administrator on CDC HIV-related grants. A lot of them were surveys.

The person I worked with at CDC on HIV surveys said that he was checking into a large hotel somewhere near the Four Corners area once, standing in a long line, and when he got up to the desk, he asked for the CDC suite of rooms. Two women behind him heard what he said and immediately drew the conclusion that he was there working on some hushed up outbreak.

They cornered him and demanded to know what was going on! He said he felt so relatively unimportant when he had to disabuse them and let them know he was there to tour all the gay bars in the area, looking for good survey sites.