Sleuthing Is the Fun

He has about him the air of restless energy and dedication that is characteristic of the breed, but his interest was slow to blossom. Son of a chemist from Canton, Mass., Scott Holmberg, 33, majored in English at Harvard. Then he joined the Peace Corps in 1971 and found himself working alone in the desolate villages of Ethiopia, struggling to learn Amharic, the country's language. It was there that the power of science changed his life. He vaccinated tens of thousands of people against smallpox as part of a team that effectively stopped the disease in the area. Many villagers, who believed he was a doctor, came to him with their afflictions, but he could do little to help. Recalls Holmberg: "I was frustrated by not knowing what was going on."

Holmberg sent for his old college biology book (he had received a gentleman's C in the course) and pored over it at night. By the time he returned to the U.S. in 1973, he had decided to become a doctor. In a year of dedicated slogging, he took the necessary preliminary courses and then graduated from Columbia University's medical school. He was determined to join the CDC, much to the amusement and disdain of more success-oriented classmates. "I was called a Goody Two-Shoes," he remembers.

Holmberg became an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer in July 1982. His salary: $38,000. "There is no place in the world to study epidemiology like the CDC," he says. "You can go as far as your curiosity will take you."

That can be pretty far. A month after joining the CDC, Holmberg was on the Pacific island of Truk fighting an outbreak of cholera. For two months he was virtually isolated from his superiors, talking weekly on a short-wave radio to a CDC doctor in Hawaii to report progress and get advice. He and the health officials on Truk discovered that cholera, previously thought to be transmitted only in water, apparently was also being spread by infected people handling food in the victims' homes. Says Holmberg: "Knowing it is a food-borne disease may make quite a difference in how we handle future outbreaks."

Last February the CDC sent Holmberg to Minnesota to help local authorities cope with an outbreak of intestinal disease caused by Salmonella newport. Groping for a lead, Holmberg visited several of the victims in their homes. "I stuck my head in their refrigerators. I asked things you would never ask your friends, as nicely as possible, about diarrhea, bowel habits, food preparation, how often they washed their hands, drug use." Working with local health authorities, Holmberg eventually traced the probable cause of the disease to a herd of cows in a muddy field in South Dakota.

Holmberg, who married Maureen Shields, a pediatric nurse, in 1981, has been in the field for three of his eleven months so far with CDC. In Atlanta he spends much of his time analyzing the data he has collected. Holmberg frets occasionally about becoming a workaholic, but clearly loves his job. "The medical sleuthing--that's the most fun. The clues start to fall into place step by step as you go through it." The disease detective's zeal is admired by his superiors. "His is the old hard-work ethic," says Dr. Mitchell Cohen, Holmberg's supervisor. "What we constantly do is pose questions. If one question doesn't pan out, he'll take another approach."

Holmberg has just signed on for another year at CDC. "I'll probably stay in public health one way or another," he says. "I'm going to spend a significant portion of my career in backwoods, dirty places trying to stop diseases that I don't like. That includes all of them." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.