Are We Ready?: Public Health since 9/11

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS x i i i The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, shocked all Americans. In just a few moments our sense of safety shattered as four airplanes attacked the American mainland for the first time in history. These attacks and the concerns about the possibility of bioterrorism following the anthrax episode a month later, together with the mobilization to inoculate thousands of health care workers and others for smallpox, led to this book. The events of 2001 and 2002 made it apparent that those working in agencies involved with a variety of population and public health issues were, for the first time in decades, central to our response to the threats facing the nation. Hence, we felt it imperative to document as fully as possible the experiences of public and population health workers, thereby developing a resource for policy makers and scholars in future years. This goal led to contact with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and an application for a grant to conduct oral histories with public health personnel in New York City who had been involved in the response to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that occurred soon after. In January 2002, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provided David Rosner and Nancy VanDevanter with a Presidential Award to conduct thirty oral histories with first responders to the attacks and to process them and deposit them in the Oral History Collection at Columbia University. We are extremely grateful to James Knickman, vice president for research and evaluation at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for his immediate and enthusiastic understanding of the importance of documenting the experiences of this community during this extremely stressful time. Further, we would like to thank Mary Marshall Clark, director of Columbia’s Oral History Office, for her aid in processing these initial interviews. Nancy VanDevanter was, of course, a critical contributor in those early months, and we are grateful for her important role in conducting many of the interviews and providing initial contact with administrators in the New York City Department of Health. As we were interviewing city workers about their immediate experiences with September 11, two simultaneous events spurred us to begin to expand our vision. First, Daniel Fox, president of the Milbank Memorial Fund, contacted us, asking if we would be interested in writing three reports for the Fund on the public health response to 9/11. The first report would build on our oral histories and other interviews that the Fund would support and would focus on the local New York City efforts to address the variety of problems for population health presented by the attacks. The second report would look at the reaction of the states, and the third report would focus on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the federal response. Unlike the formal oral histories supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, these reports would be built around a much larger number of shorter interviews done with officials across the country. Second, we received a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award to write a book tentatively titled “The Un-Natural History of Public Health,” a volume that would reevaluate public health history in light of the events of September 11. In this project we hoped to reconceptualize disease and mortality patterns in American history as a reflection of the worlds we build and the social relationships that determine how we live and die. We are grateful to David Mechanic, director, and Lynn Rogut, deputy director, of RWJ’s Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research. From the very beginning of our work they have been enthusiastic supporters of our efforts and we want to acknowledge our deep appreciation. In our original Investigator Award proposal, 9/11, anthrax, and the smallpox campaign were to be the final chapters of a larger story and, as we continue to work on this project, they remain integrally connected to that broader account. But discussions with Daniel Fox and Kathleen Andersen at Milbank, as well as the discussions that took place about our work at the annual meetings of the Robert Wood Johnson scholars’ retreat, led us to rethink our plan. It was clear that two books were x i v / A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S emerging: the present volume and a reconceptualization of the history of disease in America. Without the help of the Milbank Memorial Fund and...