by Marcus A. Horwitz, MD; Carole Novick; and Lloyd F. Novick, MD, MPH Dr. Marcus A. Horwitz, newly minted EIS (Epidemic Intelligence Service) officer, had been at his post in the Bacterial Diseases Division at CDC for barely 3 months when he got the call to investigate three infant deaths reported at a rural West Virginia hospital. It was only
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by John S. Marr, MD, MPH, and Alan M. Beck, ScD In December of 2017, a male passenger on a Jet Blue flight to Los Angeles from New York became agitated, leaped out of his seat and preceded to bite fellow passengers until he was restrained and removed from the plane during an emergency landing in Las Vegas. And just
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The week of July 4, 1989, had been hot but quiet in upstate New York. Marty Toly, the regional epidemiologist, was looking forward to the weekend when he received a call from the Onondaga County Health Department. A local doctor had just reported that a patient had tested positive for typhoid fever. Read the full story of the “Mystery in the Pines” at the Journal of Public Health
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by Cynthia B. Morrow, MD, MPH As was fairly typical, late on a Friday afternoon in mid-September, 2008, as she was getting ready to go home, one of the communicable disease nurses with the Onondaga County Health Department (OCHD) reviewed laboratory reports that had just been received from the New York State Electronic Clinical Laboratory Reporting System (ECLRS). While ECLRS
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by John S. Marr, MD, MPH, and Robert M. Maulitz, MD Dr. John Marr had been the New York City health department’s principal epidemiologist for four months when in early October 1974 he received an unusual telephone call from the Brooklyn-Cumberland Medical Center. The physician caller reported a case of malaria, which by itself was neither urgent — the patient
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by Asim A. Jani, MD, MPH Wait a minute; this is crazy. I really should be able to find the building, he thought to himself. Following the directions he had been given, he walked around the area, searching for what he envisioned a governmental public health facility should look like. There were no signs, no building numbers nor any security
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by John S. Marr, MD, MPH, and Marcus A. Horwitz, MD Just after midnight on December 27, 1974, the telephone rang at the home of Dr. John Marr, the New York City Health Department’s principal epidemiologist. In theory he was always on call if a disease outbreak was suddenly to be recognized, but he had never been bothered. A call
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by Lloyd F. Novick, MD, MPH Introducing Backstories in Epidemiology The September-October 2018 issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice includes an article entitled “Mystery in the Pines.” It recounts a large typhoid epidemic in the Catskill Mountains written by editorial board member and former New York State health official, Gus Birkhead. This article is the first in
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Welcome to another episode of JPHMP Direct TALK. Today, Elena Vidrascu speaks with Dr. John Marr, former director of the New York City Bureau of Communicable Diseases, about a new collection of case studies called Backstories in Epidemiology: True Medical Mysteries, which he co-edits with Carole Novick and JPHMP Editor-in-Chief Dr. Lloyd Novick. The first story in the collection, “Mystery in the
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