Today is the first day of this year’s Epidemic Intelligence Service conference at the CDC in Atlanta. This year is a milestone, EIS’ 75th birthday, but celebrating anything in public health right now feels detached from reality. You eat the cake, but it turns to dust in your mouth.

Every real public health head remembers their first EIS conference. Mine was in 2006. I was a fourth-year medical student in upstate New York, visiting Atlanta for a monthlong elective at the CDC. A few days before it started, I was shattered by the results of my residency match. The month I’d planned to spend triumphantly swanning around the vanguard of public health instead reeked of despair.

Most days, I entered data in a cubicle while listening to k.d. lang’s Hymns of the 49th Parallel on my iPod on a loop. (The only med school dean I liked had recommended it as I sobbed in his office the morning I left school for Atlanta: “Don’t listen to it too many times in the car or you’ll drive off a bridge, ha ha”)

Because EIS conference happened to be taking place during my elective month, I got to attend while I was in Atlanta, briefly escaping the Clifton campus for the Colony Square Hotel. 

The conference is the weeklong annual meeting for officers in the two-year EIS program, the CDC’s flagship “disease detective” training that turns clinicians and scientists into public health lifers. It’s a fast track to the biggest jobs at CDC and state and local health departments: More than half of public health leadership in the US are grads. Former CDC director Tom Frieden and TV doctor Rich Besser did EIS; the main character in Contagion, played by Kate Winslet, was modeled on Anne Schuchat’s EIS role. 

Before they can be big bosses, public health leaders need to learn to present complex public health information clearly. That’s the main purpose of EIS conference: to make officers present and defend the work they’ve done during their training. 

For some, it’s their first time presenting at a scientific conference. Because their work often covers disease outbreaks and other sexy topics, journalists and other people outside of public health frequently come to watch them, so the pressure is on.

A second critical purpose of EIS conference is to provide the backdrop for some intense professional speed dating: over the course of the week, incoming officers meet and match with the people and programs they’ll work with over the two years they’ll be at CDC. 

The collision of high-stakes timelines fills the conference with a hopeful, nervous buzz, and that vibration is what I remember most from 2006. Lots of quick-dry clothing, bike helmets, and electricity.

The conference has a third purpose: It serves as an annual reunion for EIS alumni. Many still live in Atlanta and work at either CDC or another health institution in the area, and many who work in public health nationwide and even internationally fly in for the week to hire incoming officers and new grads. In 2023, more than 1,800 people attended in person. 

In 2012, after surviving residency and then fellowship, I attended my second EIS conference — this time, as a new recruit. I now attend annually as an alum. I once heard someone refer to the conference as “public health Burning Man,” and it fits. Every spring, the young ones at the center crackle with fresh energy for the work, and the rest of us gather around year after year to absorb some of their fire. 

As budgets have shifted over the past decade, so has the event’s location and the sumptuousness of its coffee breaks. (The conference stopped serving lunch a long time ago, if it ever did.) But regardless of whether its faithful braved suburban mall traffic or choked downtown streets, it was always a real conference.

This year will be different. Of course it will be different. The CDC has been disemboweled. Nothing looks or feels the same. The agency is depleted at every level: huge numbers of leadership and rank-and-file workers across the agency have fled or been fired, and many of those left behind are struggling profoundly.

One of the biggest changes to this year’s EIS conference is its location. Instead of posting up at a local hotel, the meeting is taking place on the heavily secured CDC campus, where office windows still bear bullet holes from last August’s shooting attack by a man who blamed the Covid vaccine for his failing mental health. 

The location has huge implications on who can actually go to the conference this year. CDC workers, EIS officers, new recruits, and state and local health department people will be allowed to attend in person, but those who’ve left the agency — alumni like me — are shut out. 

Sure, people can register to watch the sessions virtually. But to people who care deeply about the CDC’s mission but are no longer employed by the agency, being barred from attending in person means losing the clubhouse right when they need it most. 

As a remedy, members of the EIS alumni association cobbled together an alternative event where alums can schmooze, watch the virtual sessions, and be together. It’s being held at a local nonprofit not far from the main campus. They’re calling it “Camp EIS”; the program only exists as a Canva slideshow, not a proper website. 

So far, at least 420 people have signed up. A photo from the venue this morning shows a mostly empty room. It’s early yet.

I’ve been reading Priya Parker’s book, The Art of Gathering. On the very first page, she writes that the power of gathering is apparent in how it’s outlawed by authoritarian countries. “Why? Because of what can happen when people come together, exchange information, inspire one another, test out new ways of being together.”

Over the past year, American public health has been hollowed out. But this week, it's gathering anyway. In secured buildings and borrowed rooms, the hopeful and the grieving will share space. I have been both at these conferences, and I know from experience that togetherness tempers and heals.

I'll report back.