In 1951, with the Korean War barely a year old and fears of biological warfare running high in Washington, an epidemiologist named Alexander Langmuir boldly proposed creating a dedicated corps of disease detectives, trained and ready to deploy anywhere a public health threat emerged.
The program Langmuir envisioned in the early years of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)— the Epidemic Intelligence Service—would span chapters of American history. Now, 75 years and more than 4,300 alumni later, the EIS continues to operate on a remarkably simple premise. When something goes wrong—a new outbreak, a yet-to-be-named disease, a community suddenly falling sick—EIS officers get a call.
Answering the Call
Dr. Eric Chow’s phone rang on Feb. 28, 2020.
Within 24 hours, he was on a plane to Seattle. He didn’t yet know he was heading toward the first known COVID-19 outbreak in the United States.
Today chief of communicable disease epidemiology and immunization at Public Health for Seattle & King County, Dr. Chow trained in internal medicine, pediatrics and infectious diseases. Joining EIS right out of residency in 2018, he chose a placement in the CDC’s Influenza Division in Atlanta. It was a deliberate choice—influenza, he reasoned, would offer exposure to nearly everything public health could throw at him: surveillance, outbreak response, pandemic preparedness, fieldwork, data, publication.
He was right, and then some. “In some ways I expected what EIS would be,” Dr. Chow said. “In some ways I truly could not anticipate it.”
Initially, he was deployed to New York to help contain a large measles outbreak, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help build Ebola screening infrastructure and to Seattle for an influenza analysis project.
EIS officers can get the call to travel anywhere in the world to investigate outbreaks like the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa that ultimately took the lives of more than 11,300 people.
Diana Scalera, director of special initiatives at the CDC Foundation.
On April 21, 2026, the CDC Foundation co-sponsored Camp EIS '75 for EISAA members to network, attend panels and live stream the EIS conference taking place at CDC.
The COVID-19 call was, in retrospect, both the capstone of his training and the portal to everything that followed. Chow and a small team were among the first federal responders in the Pacific Northwest, gathering data that would help the CDC understand what the country was facing. By June 2020, he’d finished his EIS assignment and moved to Seattle to begin an infectious disease fellowship at the University of Washington. In Seattle, Dr. Chow now heads the same department his team deployed to support during those early days of the pandemic.
“Full circle,” Dr. Chow said.
Until the Problem is Solved
That kind of through-line is what Dr. Langmuir was building in 1951, even if he couldn’t have named it in those terms. The program’s logo–worn-out shoe leather over an image of the globe–is shorthand for an ethos: when the work needs doing, you go.
EIS has trained physicians, veterinarians, dentists, nurses, pharmacists and doctoral scientists of every stripe, deploying them to investigate such health threats as smallpox, HIV/AIDS, Legionnaires’ disease, hantavirus, the 2001 anthrax attacks, mpox and others.
The first EIS class included 22 physicians and a sanitary engineer. Recent classes reflect the broadened definition of public health threat: entomologists, pharmacists, and epidemiologists trained in chronic disease alongside infectious-disease peers.
What draws them are questions officers are trained to ask about everything they encounter: why is this going on, and how can we figure out why it’s going on? What distinguishes the EIS from a typical fellowship is more difficult to quantify.
“When there’s a response and they need deployment, they’re sending you to the field from the beginning,” Dr. Chow said. “There’s also additional support from a team very interested in ensuring your success, because your success means success at the response level, too. I have never seen that in any other training program.”
EIS alumnus Eric Chow, MD, chief of communicable disease epidemiology and immunization at Public Health for Seattle & King County and current EISAA president.
Each year, high school students attend Disease Detective Camp at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, GA, to learn about epidemiology and the work of disease investigators.
Mark Rosenberg, MD, an EIS Class of 1974 alumni interviewed in a recent CDC Foundation documentary about the history of EIS.
The Ripple Effect
What the program reliably produces is leaders. One in three state epidemiologists in the United States are EIS alumni. Four of the last 11 CDC directors are EIS alumni. EIS graduates have gone on to serve at the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders and health ministries around the globe. In all, 97 percent continue in public health careers.
And those graduates, Dr. Chow argues, are just the first ring of a much wider effect.
“It’s not just the EIS officers the program trains, but all the subsequent people those alumni go on to train,” Dr. Chow said. “Through medicine, residency, fellowship, health departments—there is the immediate measure of what the program has done, and then there is what those leaders have gone on to do.”
Eager to maintain that continuity, EIS members established the EIS Alumni Association (EISAA) in the mid 1960’s. Today comprised of more than 4,300 alumni, the association has expanded its alumni reach, enhanced networking and communication among alumni, and supported the EIS program’s status as the world’s premier public health training program. The organization is almost entirely volunteer-driven: a community of full-time epidemiologists and public health officials giving time outside their day jobs to keep the network alive and connected. Dr. Chow became the association’s president in April 2026, a one-year appointment he describes as both a privilege and a responsibility at a time when a commitment to public health is more important than ever.
The EIS History Project is a multi-phase effort by the EIS Alumni Association to preserve alumni stories—capturing firsthand accounts from EIS alumni across generations and bringing them together through a documentary film and permanent archival collection. Through these voices, the project will illuminate not just what EIS has done, but why it matters—and what’s at stake for the future of public health.
