Dr. Julie Gerberding

hen Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson needed a new director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in mid-2002, he turned to an infectious disease specialist who had played a major role in the agency's response when anthrax-tainted letters were mailed the previous fall.

During the anthrax episode, Julie Gerberding had emerged as an unusually good communicator and leader. After the initial period of communications snafus and confusion, she was able to satisfy the demands of news reporters, senior Health and Human Services staff and the public at a time of widespread stress, while earning respect within the CDC.

It was not her first brush with a highly contagious, lethal disease that arrived unexpectedly. In the 1980s, she was at the center of the AIDS outbreak in San Francisco. As an intern and resident physician at the University of California-San Francisco, she treated many of the desperately ill AIDS patients at San Francisco General Hospital. Later she became the hospital's director of epidemiology.

She stayed on in San Francisco, earning a master's degree in public health and becoming a member of the university's medical school faculty. Her specialty: work-related risks facing health care professionals.

Gerberding joined CDC in 1998 as the head of its health care quality program, working to reduce medical errors, control hospital infections and slow the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria. She continued to teach, joining the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta. She became acting deputy director of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases before taking the reins of the larger agency.

Although bioterrorism remains one of her major concerns (CDC has been running the smallpox inoculation program), she has said she will seek to balance that role with many other concerns, such as the West Nile virus, the epidemic of diabetes and obesity, AIDS, and safety issues that threaten the health of Americans.