The CDC website includes stories from its physicians, including this one on Consuelo Beck-Sague, MD.
“There are multiple opportunities–both long and short term–in public health, laboratory science, and epidemiology at the Centers for Disease Control,”she says. “We are trying to make these programs as diverse as the people who actually have the diseases, which is vital.”
Cuban-born Beck-Sague followed her own dream to Temple University’s medical school. Then she received pediatric and public health training at the Martin Luther King Health Center in the South Bronx and went to Atlanta for a stint with the EIS program.
Now in her fourteenth year at the CDC, she has been involved with fighting the reemergence of infectious diseases. “Minority participation in this fight is crucial,”she says. “Minority communities have been severely affected by the emergence, in part because the public health programs for these diseases have been so successful that they were closed down. Now the country needs to rebuild its public health infrastructure in this area” Beck-Sague says.
“There is a crisis in reemerging infections and emerging infections that has hit hardest in the minority communities, communities with socioeconomic problems that affect access to care,” she says. “It is vitally important that we get people who are involved in our community. These are the people who are going to be the pioneers of public health laboratory practice in the year 2000.”
For more information about CDC physicians, please visit their website.
