Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

The CDC works to protect public health and safety by controlling and preventing disease, injury, and disability. It focuses on important areas like infectious diseases, food borne pathogens, environmental health, occupational safety and health, health promotion, and injury prevention. The CDC also looks at non-infectious diseases such as obesity and diabetes.

In the future, the CDC is planned to change its focus more towards infectious disease programs. However, it has faced challenges in recent years, including disruptions to its work and changes in leadership. These changes have made it harder for the CDC to keep its information up to date and trusted by the public.

History

See also: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention timeline

Establishment

The Communicable Disease Center was founded July 1, 1946, as the successor to the World War II Malaria Control in War Areas program of the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities.

Preceding its founding, organizations with global influence in malaria control were the Malaria Commission of the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation greatly supported malaria control, sought to have the governments take over some of its efforts, and collaborated with the agency.

The new agency was a branch of the U.S. Public Health Service and Atlanta was chosen as the location because malaria was common in the Southern United States. The agency changed names before adopting the name Communicable Disease Center in 1946. Offices were located on the sixth floor of the Volunteer Building on Peachtree Street.

With a budget at the time of about $1 million, 59 percent of its personnel were engaged in mosquito control and habitat management with the objective of controlling and stopping malaria in the United States.

Among its 369 employees, the main jobs at CDC were originally entomology and engineering. In CDC's early years, more than six and a half million homes were sprayed, mostly with DDT. In 1946, there were only seven medical officers on duty and an early organization chart was drawn. Under Joseph Walter Mountin, the CDC continued to be an advocate for public health issues and pushed to extend its responsibilities to many other communicable diseases.

In 1947, the CDC made a small payment of $10 to Emory University for 15 acres (61,000 m²) of land on Clifton Road in DeKalb County, still the home of CDC headquarters as of 2025. CDC employees collected the money to make the purchase. The benefactor behind the "gift" was Robert W. Woodruff, chairman of the board of the Coca-Cola Company. Woodruff had a long-time interest in malaria control, which had been a problem in areas where he went hunting. The same year, the PHS transferred its San Francisco based plague laboratory into the CDC as the Epidemiology Division, and a new Veterinary Diseases Division was established.

The CDC inherited the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from its predecessor, the U.S. Public Health Service. In the study, which lasted from 1932 to 1972, a group of Black men (nearly 400 of whom had a certain disease) were studied to learn more about the disease. The disease was left untreated in the men, who had not given their permission to serve as research subjects.

Growth

In 1951, Chief Epidemiologist Alexander Langmuir's warnings of possible dangers during the Korean War led to the creation of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) as a two-year training program in disease study. The success of the EIS program led to the launch of Field Epidemiology Training Programs (FETP) in 1980, training more than 18,000 disease experts in over 80 countries. In 2020, FETP celebrated the 40th anniversary of the CDC's support for Thailand's Field Epidemiology Training Program. Thailand was the first FETP site created outside of North America and is found in many countries, showing CDC's influence in promoting this model internationally. The Training Programs in Epidemiology and Public Health Interventions Network (TEPHINET) has graduated 950 students.

The mission of the CDC expanded beyond its original focus on malaria to include diseases when a part of the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) was transferred to the CDC in 1957. Shortly after, Tuberculosis Control was transferred (in 1960) to the CDC from PHS, and then in 1963 the Immunization program was established.

It became the National Communicable Disease Center effective July 1, 1967, and the Center for Disease Control on June 24, 1970. At the end of the Public Health Service reorganizations of 1966–1973, it was promoted to being a main working group of PHS.

1980–2018

The organization was renamed to the plural Centers for Disease Control effective October 14, 1980, as the modern organization of having multiple centers was established. By 1990, it had four centers formed in the 1980s: the Center for Infectious Diseases, Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the Center for Environmental Health and Injury Control, and the Center for Prevention Services; as well as two centers that had been absorbed by CDC from outside: the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in 1973, and the National Center for Health Statistics in 1987.

An act of the United States Congress added the words "and Prevention" to the name effective October 27, 1992. However, Congress directed that the short name CDC be kept because of its name recognition. Since the 1990s, the CDC focus has broadened to include long-term health problems, support for people with limitations, injury prevention, workplace hazards, environmental health threats, and readiness for attacks. CDC fights new diseases and other health risks, including problems with birth development, West Nile virus, weight problems, avian, swine, and flu from animals, certain bacteria, and plans for stopping attacks. The organization would also help stop the wrong use of penicillin. In May 1994 the CDC said it had sent samples of diseases to the Iraqi government from 1984 through 1989 which were later used for harmful purposes, including certain viruses and bacteria.

In 1992, Mark L. Rosenberg and five CDC colleagues started the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, with an annual budget of about $260,000. They worked on "finding causes of deaths from guns, and ways to stop them". Their first report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993 entitled "Guns are a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home", reported "just having a gun in a home raised the risk of a death from a gun by 2.7 percent, and risk of taking one's own life five times – a "big" increase". In response, a group in support of gun rights started a "campaign to stop the Injury Center". Two groups supporting gun rights joined the effort, and, by 1995, politicians also supported the gun rights group. In 1996, Jay Dickey (R) Arkansas introduced the Dickey Amendment stating "none of the money for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to support or promote gun control" as a part of the 1996 spending bill. People who wanted to stop gun violence did not agree and kept trying to change it after it was passed. In 1997, "Congress moved all of the money for gun research to the study of injuries to the brain." David Satcher, CDC head 1993–98 spoke up for research on guns.

On April 21, 2005, then–CDC director Julie Gerberding formally announced the reorganization of CDC to "deal with the health threats of the 21st century". She made four new groups. In 2009 the Obama administration reviewed this change and decided to remove it as an extra layer of management.

On May 16, 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's blog shared an article about what to do to get ready for a pretend attack from walking dead people. While the article did not say that such a situation was possible, it used a popular idea to encourage people to get ready for all possible dangers, such as earthquakes, storms, and floods.

According to David Daigle, the main person for sharing information, public health readiness, and answers, the idea started when his team was talking about their coming campaign about being ready for hurricanes and Daigle wondered "we say pretty much the same things every year, in the same way, and I just wonder how many people are paying attention." A person who shares information on social media mentioned that the idea of walking dead people had come up a lot on Twitter when she had been sharing information about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and radiation. The team decided that a campaign like this would most likely reach a different group from the one that normally pays attention to warnings about hurricane readiness and went to work on the walking dead people campaign, starting it right before the hurricane season began. "The whole idea was, if you're ready for a world of walking dead people, you're ready for pretty much anything," said Daigle.

Once the blog article was shared, the CDC started a contest open to everyone on YouTube for the most creative and helpful videos about being ready for a world of walking dead people (or any kind of world ending event), to be chosen by the "CDC Walking Dead People Task Force". Entries were open until October 11, 2011. They also shared a walking dead people-themed graphic story book available on their website. Walking dead people-themed learning materials for teachers are available on the site.

In 2013, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics sent a letter to the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee asking them "to support at least $10 million within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in FY 2014 along with enough new taxes at the National Institutes of Health to support research into the causes and ways to stop violence. Furthermore, we ask Members to not support any efforts to reduce, stop, or change CDC money related to research on stopping violence." Congress kept the rule in later budgets. In 2016 over a dozen "public health experts, including current and former CDC leaders" told The Trace interviewers that CDC leaders took a careful way in how they explained the Dickey Amendment and that they could do more but were afraid of political trouble and personal problems.

As of 2013, the CDC's Biosafety Level 4 labs were among the few that exist in the world. They included one of only two official stores of smallpox in the world, with the other one located at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in the Russian Federation. In 2014, the CDC said they had found several lost samples of smallpox while their workers were "might have been exposed" to anthrax.

The city of Atlanta took in the property of the CDC headquarters effective January 1, 2018, as part of the city's biggest taking in 65 years; the Atlanta City Council had voted to do so the month before. The CDC and Emory University had asked the Atlanta city government to take in the area, helping make way for a MARTA expansion through the Emory campus, paid for by city taxes. The headquarters were located in an area not part of a city, counted in the Druid Hills area with no city.

COVID-19

See also: Trump administration communication during the COVID-19 pandemic § Testing

The CDC has been widely discussed for how it dealt with the COVID-19 disease. In 2022, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said "some very big, very public mistakes, from testing to information to sharing," based on the results of an inside review.

The first proven case of COVID-19 was found in the U.S. on January 20, 2020. However, wide COVID-19 testing in the United States was effectively stopped until February 28, when government workers changed a wrong CDC test, and days later, when the Food and Drug Administration began changing rules that had stopped other labs from making tests. In February 2020, as the CDC's early coronavirus test did not work nationwide, CDC Director Robert R. Redfield told other workers on the White House Coronavirus Task Force that the problem would be quickly fixed, according to White House workers. It took about three weeks to fix the wrong test kits, which might have been mixed up during their making in a CDC lab. Later checks by the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services found that the CDC had not followed its own rules in making its tests. In November 2020, NPR reported that an inside review they got showed that the CDC knew that the first group of tests which were sent out in early January had a chance of being wrong 33 percent of the time, but they sent them anyway.

In May 2020, The Atlantic reported that the CDC was mixing up the results of two different kinds of coronavirus tests – tests that find current coronavirus infections, and tests that find whether someone has had the virus before. The magazine said this mixed up several important numbers, gave the country an wrong picture of the state of the disease, and made the country's testing ability look better than it was.

In July 2020, the Trump administration told hospitals to not use the CDC and instead send all COVID-19 patient information to a database at the Department of Health and Human Services. Some health experts did not agree with the order and said the information might become political or hidden from the public. On July 15, the CDC worried health care groups by taking down COVID-19 information from its website for a short time. It put the information back the next day.

In August 2020, the CDC said that people showing no COVID-19 signs do not need testing. The new information worried many health experts. The information was made by the White House Coronavirus Task Force without the agreement of Anthony Fauci of the NIH. Other experts at the CDC did not agree but were not heard. Officials said that a CDC document in July about "the value of opening schools" was also made outside the CDC. On August 16, the main helper, Kyle McGowan, and his helper, Amanda Campbell, left the agency. The testing information was changed back on September 18, 2020, after public discussion.

In September 2020, the CDC made a rule ready to require masks on all public travel in the United States, but the White House Coronavirus Task Force stopped the rule, saying no and not talking about it, according to two federal health workers.

In October 2020, it became known that White House helpers had changed the writings of CDC scientists about COVID-19 many times, including information about church music groups, keeping space in bars and restaurants, and short forms of public-health reports.

In the time before 2020 Thanksgiving, the CDC told Americans not to travel for the holiday saying, "It's not required. It's a suggestion for the American public to think about." The White House coronavirus task force had its first public meeting in months on that day but travel was not talked about.

The New York Times later said that the CDC's choices to "follow political pressure from the Trump White House to change or hide important public health information [...]" took away some public trust that experts say it still has not gotten back as of 2022.

In May 2021, after discussion by scientists, the CDC changed its COVID-19 information to say that the disease can spread through the air, after having said before that most infections happened via "close contact, not spread through the air."

In December 2021, after a request from the boss of Delta Air Lines, CDC made shorter its suggested time away from others for people infected with COVID-19 without symptoms from 10 days to five.

Until 2022, the CDC kept back important information about COVID-19 vaccine boosters, hospitalizations and waste water information.

On June 10, 2022, the Biden Administration told the CDC to end the COVID-19 testing requirement for air travelers entering the United States.

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report changes

During the disease, the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) was pushed by political workers at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to change its sharing so as not to disagree with what Trump was saying about the disease.

Starting in June 2020, Michael Caputo, the HHS main helper for sharing information, and his main helper Paul Alexander tried to make MMWR shares about the good effects of possible treatments for COVID-19, how easy the virus spreads, and other issues where the president had said things, wait, be stopped, changed, and looked at before they were shared. Alexander tried without success to get personal approval of all issues of MMWR before they went out.

Caputo said this watching was needed because MMWR shares were being mixed with "political ideas"; he wanted to know the political ideas of the scientists who said that hydroxychloroquine had little good effect as a treatment while Trump was saying the opposite. In emails Alexander said CDC scientists were trying to "hurt the president" and write "attacks on the administration."

In October 2020, emails got by Politico showed that Alexander asked for many changes in a share. The changes that were shared included a title being changed from "Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults" to "Persons." One current and two former CDC officials who looked at the email trades said they were worried by the "effort to change science shares seen as safe before the Trump administration" that "seemed to make the risks of the virus to children less clear."

Trust in the CDC after COVID-19

A check done in September 2020 found that nearly 8 in 10 Americans trusted the CDC, a drop from 87 percent in April 2020. Another check showed an even bigger drop in trust with the numbers dropping 16 points. By January 2022, according to an NBC News check, only 44% of Americans trusted the CDC compared to 69% at the start of the disease. As the trustworthiness fell, so did the information it shared. The falling level of trust in the CDC and the information it shares also caused "vaccine uncertainty" with the result that "just 53 percent of Americans said they would be somewhat or very likely to get a vaccine."

In September 2020, during the talks and the falling image of the CDC, the agency's leaders were asked about. Former acting director at the CDC, Richard Besser, said of Redfield that "I find it troubling that the CDC director has not spoken up when there have been cases of clear political mixing in the use of science." In addition, Mark Rosenberg, the first director of CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, also asked about Redfield's leadership and his lack of defense of science.

Historically, the CDC has not been a political group; however, the COVID-19 disease, and specially the Trump administration's way of dealing with the disease, led to a "dangerous change" according to a past CDC director and others. Four past directors say that the agency's voice was "quiet for political reasons." Mixing politics into the agency has kept going into the Biden administration as COVID-19 information is not the same as State information and the agency is discussed as "CDC's trustworthiness is falling."

In 2021, the CDC, then under the leadership of the Biden administration, got talks about its mixed messages about COVID-19 vaccines, information about wearing masks, and the state of the disease.

On August 17, 2022, Walensky said the CDC would make big changes after mistakes during the COVID-19 disease. She gave an outline of how the CDC would look at and share information and how they would share information with the general public. In her talk to all CDC workers, she said: "For 75 years, CDC and public health have been ready for COVID-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not regularly meet expectations." Based on the results of an inside report, Walensky said that "The CDC must focus again on public health needs, answer faster to problems and outbreaks of disease, and share information in a way that normal people and state and local health workers can understand and use" (as said by the New York Times).

Second Trump administration

In January 2025, it was reported that a CDC official had told all CDC staff to stop working with the World Health Organization. Around January 31, 2025, several CDC websites, pages, and sets of information about HIV and diseases passed from one person to another, LGBT and young people health were stopped from being seen after the agency was told to follow Donald Trump's order to take away all material of "different ideas, equal help, and care" and "who you are." Also in January 2025, because of a stop in sharing by the second Trump administration at government health groups, sharing of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) was stopped, the first time that had happened since it started in 1960. The boss of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) called the stop in sharing a "problem." Tries to stop sharing had been made by the first Trump administration after MMWR shared information about COVID-19 that "did not agree with messages from the White House." The stop in sharing also caused a meeting between the CDC and IDSA about problems to public health regarding the H5N1 bird virus to be stopped.

On February 1, 2025, the CDC told its scientists to take back any not yet shared research they had made which included any of the following stopped words: "Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female". Larry Gostin, director of the World Health Organization Center on Global Health Law, said that the order was like stopping not only government workers, but private people as well. For example, if the main writer of a shared paper works for the CDC and takes their name from the paper, that kills the paper even if working writers who are private scientists stay on it. Other stopped subjects include ideas about equal help, climate change, and HIV.

After a lot of talks from the public, some, but not all, of the stopped pages were put back. The CDC's stopping led to many researchers and reporters to keep databases themselves, with many stopped articles being put up on saving sites such as the Internet Archive.

On February 4, Doctors for America started a government court fight against the CDC, Food and Drug Administration, and Department of Health and Human Services, asking the stopped websites to be put back online. On February 11, a judge told stopped pages to be put back for a short time while the court fight is being thought about, saying doctors who said the stopped materials were "important for making decisions right now."

On February 14, 2025, around 1,300 CDC workers were let go by the administration, which included all first-year officers of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. The cuts also ended 16 of the 24 Laboratory Leadership Service program helpers, a program made for early-career lab scientists to fix testing problems at the CDC. In the next month, the Trump administration quietly took back its CDC leader choice, Dave Weldon, just minutes before his planned Senate confirmation hearing on March 13.

In April 2025, it was reported that among the cuts is the end of the Freedom of Information Act team, the Division of Violence Prevention, labs involved in testing for fighting bad bacteria, and the team responsible for finding when bad baby products need to be taken back. Additional cuts affect the technology part of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which includes software workers and computer scientists helping the centre made during the COVID-19 disease to make better guesses about when diseases might break out.

In August 2025, over 600 CDC workers were let go and a number of programs completely ended, including "[m]aternal and child health services, oral health programs, and the CDC's long-running Violence Against Children and Youth Surveys (VACS)." Experts have talked about the big cuts under Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for making dangerous gaps in public health. VACS, for instance, has been very important in getting good, useful data used to find and stop violent hurt against children, with such hurt being guessed to affect half of all children around the world.

2025 headquarters shooting

On August 8, 2025, 30-year-old Patrick Joseph White of Kennesaw, Georgia, attacked the CDC's Roybal Campus in Atlanta, Georgia. White tried to get into the headquarters, but was stopped by safety workers. White then drove across the street to a CVS Pharmacy where he locked himself inside on the second floor, and shot at the campus with a gun, hitting four CDC buildings on many floors over 180 times, breaking about 150 windows and hitting some of the safety windows; workers found more than 500 empty cases from the gun and five guns after the shooting. 33-year-old David Rose, a DeKalb County Police Department officer, was hurt badly by White as he arrived on the scene. Officers went into the pharmacy and found White dead from a shot he made to himself.

White is believed to have been motivated by not trusting vaccines, and believed the COVID-19 vaccine had made him sad and wanting to die. He had asked for help with his mind for weeks before the attack. Fired But Fighting, a group of CDC workers who lost their jobs, blamed the attack on the talking against vaccines by members of the Trump administration, saying that Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., "is directly responsible for making fun of CDC's workers through his constant lies about science and vaccine safety". A group speaking for CDC workers asked both the CDC and the leaders of the Department of Health and Human Services to speak out against talking that does not agree with science about vaccines, and said that the attack was a result of mixing information that does not agree with science and speaking badly about science and health workers. While Kennedy Jr. had talked to CDC workers and said "no one should face violence while working to protect the health of others", Jerome Adams, a past surgeon general, said Kennedy Jr.'s answer was "not strong enough" and that Kennedy Jr. must do more because of his past "strong words".

White's father spoke in an interview with WANF, saying that he and his wife were watching a cable TV channel in their Kennesaw home when the phone rang. He answered the phone and tried to have a normal talk with his son. White talked to his father, "I'm gonna shoot up the CDC", before hanging up after. The couple quickly changed their channel to one of the Atlanta stations, where his father saw the clear picture of his car at the scene.

2025 advisory committee purge and leadership dispute

On May 14, 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that lawyer Matthew Buzzelli was acting CDC director, though it was not shown on the CDC website.

In June 2025, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and—with one exception—appointed members who are either people who do not agree with vaccines or who do not have knowledge about vaccines.

Susan Monarez was chosen as CDC head on July 31, 2025, but on August 27, it was said on X (before Twitter) that she had been let go. Monarez said the way she was let go was not legal, as it had not been done by the president, and it had been falsely said that she had said she would leave. The president later officially let her go. Monarez was let go after she said she would not agree to possible not based on science suggestions from ACIP and to let go important workers who know about vaccines. The next day, the Trump administration said the choice of Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O'Neill as a replacement.

After news of Monarez's leaving, at least four other CDC important workers said they were leaving:

• Debra Houry, Chief Medical Officer
• Demetre Daskalakis, Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases
• Daniel Jernigan, Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases
• Jennifer Layden, Director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology, which contains the National Center for Health Statistics

Dozens of CDC workers walked out of headquarters and showed they were not agreed with Monarez and the leaving workers.

In November 2025 it was said that research on monkeys at CDC is due to end.

Organization

Main article: Organization of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The CDC is made up of different centers, institutes, and offices. Each part works on a specific area of health, like helping people stay healthy during flu season or studying diseases that animals can pass to humans. They also work together to solve big health problems.

As of February 2023, the CDC includes groups like the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, among others.

Most CDC offices are in the Atlanta area, Georgia, with three main campuses: Chamblee, Roybal, and Lawrenceville. Some centers also have offices in other places in the United States, like Maryland, Colorado, and Washington, D.C.

Budget

The CDC had a budget of $11.581 billion for the year 2024. This money helps the CDC work on keeping people healthy and safe.

Workforce

As of 2021, the CDC had about 15,000 workers, including 6,000 workers hired for specific jobs and 840 officers in the United States Public Health Service. Most of these workers had at least a bachelor's degree, and nearly half had advanced degrees.

Some common jobs at the CDC include engineer, entomologist, epidemiologist, biologist, physician, veterinarian, behavioral scientist, nurse, medical technologist, economist, public health advisor, health communicator, toxicologist, chemist, computer scientist, and statistician. The CDC also offers special training programs.

Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS)

The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) helps solve public health problems both in the United States and around the world. EIS officers are called in to help during disease outbreaks and provide expert advice on how to stop them.

Public Health Associates Program

The CDC runs the Public Health Associate Program (PHAP), a two-year paid training program for recent college graduates. This program helps new graduates work in public health jobs across the United States.

Leadership

The director of the CDC is a position that needs approval from a group of leaders in the government. The director works under the president and can be asked to leave at any time. The CDC director also works as the head of another agency that deals with harmful substances and health problems.

Before January 20, 2025, the CDC director could be chosen in different ways, either by a long-term employee or by someone chosen for political reasons without needing government approval. This changed because of a law passed in 2023.

Many leaders have served as the director of the CDC or its earlier agencies. Some served during different times of leadership in the country.

List of directors

The following people have served as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (or chief of the Communicable Disease Center):

Datasets and survey systems

The CDC collects important health information to help keep people safe. It has many tools to gather data, like telephone surveys and special health checks. Some of these tools track things like health habits, pregnancy health, and medical records.

Recently, some of the CDC’s databases stopped getting updated regularly. This means that important health information, like details about vaccines and certain diseases, was not always current. This change happened around the time new leaders joined the department that oversees the CDC. Because of this, some states and medical groups have started to share health information themselves to fill the gap.

Areas of focus

The CDC works on many important health topics to keep people safe. It studies over 400 diseases and health threats that can cause illness or death. You can find information on the CDC website about diseases like smallpox and measles.

The CDC focuses on stopping the spread of diseases like influenza, including special efforts for types such as H1N1. It also has programs to protect against rare and dangerous substances, such as anthrax and the Ebola virus. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the CDC helped bring infected aid workers back to Emory University Hospital for treatment.

The CDC also looks at health problems that aren’t caused by infections, like those related to obesity. It works globally with groups like the World Health Organization to stop diseases from spreading around the world. The CDC offers health advice for travelers, including a book called the “yellow book” with tips for staying healthy in different travel destinations.

The CDC monitors vaccine safety using tools like the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and works with healthcare organizations to share data about vaccine safety. It also has a program called V-safe, a smartphone app that checks in with people after they get a COVID-19 vaccine to see how they’re feeling.

CDC Foundation

The CDC Foundation is a private, nonprofit group that works to support the CDC’s mission. It partners with many different groups, such as businesses, schools, and individuals. Since 1995, it has helped start over 1,200 health programs and raised more than $1.6 billion.

The foundation works on health projects in over 160 countries. Some of these projects focus on helping people with heart disease, cancer, emergencies, and infections like HIV/AIDS, Ebola, rotavirus, and COVID-19.

One special program, called EmPOWERED Health, began in 2019 with help from Amgen. It helps cancer patients take an active role in deciding about their treatments. The foundation also gives out an annual prize called the Fries Prize for Improving Health, which started in 1992 to honor people who have done great work in improving health for many.

Publications

The CDC shares important information through many different publications. Some of these include reports and journals like the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and Preventing Chronic Disease. They also provide updates through the State of CDC report and CDC Programs in Brief, as well as vital statistics. These resources help people learn about health and stay informed.