• From the October 2016 issue of The Rotarian

Tom Frieden is a little out of breath. He just climbed the stairs from a meeting to his office on the top floor of the 12-story headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“I did that because we have a beautiful stairway in this building. I can look outside, and I get better email coverage on the stairs than I do in the elevator,” the CDC director says. His trip up the stairs sums up his view on one of the tenets of his work: “The sweet spot of public health is making the healthiest thing to do the default value — in other words, the easiest thing to do.”

Frieden took his post in 2009 after stopping the largest outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in U.S. history in New York City, helping establish TB treatment programs in India that have saved more than 3 million lives, and serving seven-plus years as health commissioner of New York City. There, he worked with Mayor Michael Bloomberg to make all restaurants and bars smoke-free, making New York the first major city to do so outside California. His controversial policies had him criticized as a “nanny” in some circles, and lauded as a visionary in others.

‘The thing that worries us from a public health standpoint … is the potential of an influenza pandemic. … We’re still not as prepared as we’d like to be. We don’t have the vaccines we’d like, and the virus is … constantly mutating.’

As head of the U.S. public health system, Frieden has taken on everything from ebola to the flu. But, where his work most closely intersects with Rotary’s is in polio eradication –- CDC joins Rotary, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Health Organization (WHO) as a core partner in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. CDC deploys scientists to investigate outbreaks of polio, identify the strain of poliovirus involved, and pinpoint its geographic origin.

“Rotary has done such a phenomenal job for so many decades on this, and now we are poised to get over the finish line and end polio once and for all,” Frieden said in an interview with Rotarian senior editor Diana Schoberg about ending polio and the best buys in public health.

THE ROTARIAN: Polio has been eradicated in the U.S. since 1979. Why does CDC stay involved?

FRIEDEN: CDC takes polio eradication very seriously. We focus on supporting the front lines wherever polio continues to spread. I am deeply engaged with all aspects of the response and support for our team. That includes laboratory work, community outreach, organization of the response, extension of the capacity of local doctors and outreach workers, and tracking cases so we can target our responses and get to the last bastions of polio in the world.

TR: The estimated funding gap to eradicate polio is $1.5 billion. Why is it such a large number?

FRIEDEN: It costs a lot because as long as there’s still polio anywhere, every country needs to continue to act as if polio could get reintroduced. Every year polio is not eradicated will cost another $800 million. You need vaccines, surveillance, and social mobilization. All of that takes people and money. Up to 400 million children still need to be immunized every year, and surveillance in up to 70 countries needs to not only continue, but be intensified, to ensure we are finding all possible cases of polio for as long as polio may be spreading.Read More »