The CDC

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grew out of a wartime mission to kill mosquitoes. Established in Atlanta in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center, it inherited the government's effort to control malaria across the American South, and it kept its headquarters in the South rather than Washington ever after. From that narrow beginning it became the nation's premier public-health agency, charged with tracking, understanding, and stopping the diseases that threaten Americans.

The CDC made disease surveillance a science. Its Epidemic Intelligence Service trained a corps of "disease detectives" who could be dispatched to the site of any mysterious outbreak, and the agency played a central role in the global campaign that eradicated smallpox and in the fight against polio. Over the decades its mandate widened from infectious disease to chronic illness, injury prevention, and the broad health of the population.

Its work repeatedly thrust it into moments of national fear. The CDC named and tracked AIDS in the 1980s, responded to anthrax letters and Ebola scares, and stood at the center of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020. That pandemic tested the agency as never before, straining its capacity and, for the first time, drawing its scientific guidance deep into political controversy.

Guarding the health of a nation of hundreds of millions, the CDC embodies the modern idea that disease is a problem for organized, expert public action rather than fate. Its history — from mosquito control to pandemic response — traces the rise of American public health, and the fragile public trust on which such an agency ultimately depends.