MedPage Today Thinking of calling CDC to report a potential disease outbreak? Don’t bother; no one will answer, a former CDC employee said Tuesday.
“If it’s an infection that is being seen in the hospital in four different patients, and the infection control nurse calls [the CDC] … You are working with the physicians, the nurses, the schools, the restaurants, to try and sort through, ‘What is going on and what can we do?'” said Karen Remley, MD, MPH, former director of the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. “Sometimes that help might be, ‘We’re going to send some people to you; we’re going to give you more boots on the ground to help you do this.’ Sometimes that might be talking to somebody who’s one of the only world experts on a specific type of infection or a specific type of exposure. But [now] there’s nobody to answer the phone.”