The CDC website includes stories from its physicians, including this one on Helene P. Gayle, MD, MPH.
Dr. Helene P. Gayle is the director of the National Center for HIV, STD, TB Prevention. As head of the center, which has 1,000 employees and a $634 million budget, she is the CDC’s highest ranking African-American woman.
That’s not something she talks about, however. “One of the hallmarks of CDC is team work,” she says. “I don’t pretend to think that I am truly the sole decision-maker. I have an excellent team who bring many years of public health experience to bear, and I use that team as effectively as possible.”
Nor will she take pride in the fact that the rate of increases of new AIDS cases has slowed to about 5% annually. “We still need to do more. It has not shown negative growth yet,” Gayle says. It is spreading more rapidly in some minority populations, she says, and the center will need to step up its prevention efforts in those communities.
Under the CDC mission, the center leads the nation in preventing the disease, while the National Institutes of Health is charged with finding a cure for it. “Our society tends to have this sense that you don’t worry about prevention, you just worry about cure,” Gayle says. “By preventing something, you save all of the suffering, all the cost. This is what we stand for as an agency.”
Gayle, a pediatrician who received her MD from the University of Pennsylvania and her MPH from Johns Hopkins University, remained with the CDC as a staff epidemiologist after finishing her Epidemic Intelligence Service training and her residency at the agency. She has worked extensively in Africa, evaluating and implementing child survival programs as well as AIDS research.
Her goals are focused on universal global health outcomes. “We hope to eliminate tuberculosis in this country by the year 2000,” she says. And we’re actively engaged in syphilis elimination. The south is the last remaining area, mostly among poor Black rural folks who don’t get a lot of medical care.”
As for her trail-blazing role as a leader in public health, Gayle says it’s just a beginning: If I am here that means there will be many more after me. It’s just a matter of time.
For more information about CDC physicians, please visit their website.
