Top Top Secret Agent Dodo

The ultimate crowning glory to any secret agent's career is to be acknowledged by none other than the Top Top Secret Agent herself, Julie Gerberding. So I get invited one day to a reception, feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, thinking that this is my big moment to put my name on the map.

Several things went wrong that day. First, Agent 69 was in perpetual disguise as a medical student. If my cubicle wasn't on the way to the bathroom, nobody would know of my existence. So as people make their way to go pee, they look into my cubicle and sometimes I say hi, as I scurry to change the window on my computer to display an excel spreadsheet with numbers, a file I have chosen to name "Dummy". In keeping with my disguise, I had worn a pair of slacks with a T-shirt. The disguise was complete with a hoody to ward off indoor chill. With a ponytail riding high on my head, I could very easily pass off for a fourteen-year-old, which is also part of the disguise. How was I even going to make a dent in the map?

Second, in all my excitement, I had expended all my energy into this Dummy project that I forgot about the Secret Agent engagement. At 4:15, I was still busy, inputting data, when the Secret Agent Alarm goes off. Secret Agent engagement was at 5 and I hadn't gone out of disguise yet, let alone have a single ironed shirt in my closet! At 4:30, I make it back and whip on a pair of slacks and a shirt that is wrinkle proof (made especially for secret agents that also doubles up as a bullet-proof vest) and headed to meet Top Top Secret Agent.

I arrive with 2 minutes to spare and immediately noticed the large table filled with yummy goodies in the middle of the reception hall. As is my custom, I make a beeline for the food, wondering why no one has attacked the spinach dip or the fancy cheeses. Having been deprived of lunch due to the extreme work load, I was famished! As I helped myself to the green, stinky cheese, I got plenty of weird stares from the room chock full of PhDieties and MDieties. With a mouthful of celery sticks, I smile at them. Then, this burly man with glasses goes up to the microphone and says:

"Everyone, Dr Gerberding is running a little late, so why don't you help yourselves to the food."

And like a pack of hyenas, the whole obedient, well trained bunch of government pets descend on me and the food table like there was no tomorrow. As I scamper from underneath all of them, I said to myself that at least I got first dibs at the stinky cheese.

As conversations crescendo and people buzz about how important their jobs are, I remember speaking to another medical student secret agent in disguise, whose role is somehow defined as something more important than mine just because he gets the privilege of spending an entire year at Headquarters shuffling papers and doing internet research, about how pointless some of this 'research' was, taking for example the surveillance they were doing on Lyme disease in New York, which became a reportable disease in 1997, just like pertussis is reportable.

Lyme disease, named for Lyme, Connecticut, is something one catches from a tick. It's a bacteria that infects the tick and subsequently infects humans as the tick takes a blood meal, supplied by the human, the accidental food source, the primary being deer, but the tick doesn't care. Just as long as it gets to live, it is not picky if its food source is a deer, a human or a dog. If you have warm blood, you're the meal d'jour. Since 1997, the incidence of this disease has increased. No duh, right? If you make it mandatory to report Lyme's, then you wonder why the incidence has gone up but instead of saying: the incidence has gone up because people had to report it, they say that the incidence has gone up because there is more Lyme disease and this is becoming a public health nightmare. Breed fear and panic, the best way to get people to do something. And here is where I come in. After all this surveillance, in which we are so convinced that more and more people are getting Lyme's and the entire thing will get out of control in the year 2020, what are we going to do about it? Why have we spent, oh, 6 million tax payer dollars on Lyme surveillance? It's not like we are going to kill off all the ticks in New York and the surrounding area. Oh, they say, we can warn people to wear Deet and don on protective clothing to prevent tick bites and avoid tick infested areas especially in the months of May to August. Couldn't we have done that without spending 6 million dollars on something we know exists in that corner of the world since the beginning of time? And exactly how many people die from Lyme disease and its complications? Something like 0.0000000001%. These are the very same people who say we are spending too much on superfluous things such as fighting wars on other people's turf. Lyme's surveillance is very much similar to Asthma surveillance and combating air pollution. Compare this with surveillance and research on some superbug like Ebola, whose kill rate is 100%, and then you can appreciate that some things just demand more attention and funding. If I was the government and I had only $100 to spend, I would give 100% of it to someone studying Ebola rather than someone studying asthma or air pollution or Lyme disease. But because the federal government is not communist and cannot shut the whiners up, everyone has something important they want to study and they will cry like a little baby in the middle of the living room floor if the Parent doesn't give them what they want. Julie Gerberding's mission is to concentrate money on things that demand more attention. To this end, the asthma/Lyme's/Air pollution/people studying why people choose to overdose on prescription medications people are not very fond of her. To them, she has ruined science and the credibility of the CDC because she chose to run it like UPS.

On the back drop of this conversation, I meet Top Top Secret Agent. She walks in with her pink blazer and heads directly for me, extends her hand and says:

"Hello."

My celery is still stuck in between my teeth but I introduce myself.

"Hi Dr Gerberding, my name is Agent 69." A big smile is planted across my face. Gerberding smiles back and pauses, as if waiting for something miraculous to plop out of my mouth.
"You have to tell me which division you work for."
"Oh," I say. "Air pollution and respiratory health."

I see her smile begin to fade a little at the corner.
No, no! But really, I wish I was assigned to the Special Pathogens Branch because Ebola, Ebola is my friend!

But all that came out was my Center affiliation, National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH), of which my branch is a part.

"Ah," Top Top Secret Agent says. "There will be a meeting in Congress about Climate Change next week."
"Ah," I say back and because I don't really believe that Al Gore had won the Nobel Prize for his work on Climate Change, a topic I have great skepticism for, I reserve my skepticism for when it won't get me into trouble.

I am sure that in my attempts at making it onto the map, I had promptly ungracefully fallen right off and by the time Julie Gerberding boards her corporate jet for Angola, Africa, Agent 69 would be but a small spec of dust on her fancy pink blazer that she has just brushed off.