How CDC Began: A Malaria Office in Atlanta With $10 Million and Fewer Than 400 People

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started small and specific. On July 1, 1946, the Communicable Disease Center opened its doors on a single floor of a small building in Atlanta with one mission: keep malaria from spreading across the nation. It had a budget of only $10 million and fewer than 400 employees, and among its first challenges was simply getting enough trucks, sprayers and shovels to wage war on mosquitoes.

The laboratory at 291 Peachtree Street, Atlanta, 1945: Aimee Wilcox and laboratory director Dr. Seward Miller. Credit: CDC.

Why Atlanta

The new center took root in the South, once the heart of the malaria zone. It carried on the work of Malaria Control in War Areas, a wartime program headquartered in Atlanta.

Growing beyond malaria

CDC's founder, Dr. Joseph Mountin, was a visionary public health leader with high hopes for what was then a small and relatively insignificant branch of the Public Health Service. He kept pushing for it to take on other communicable diseases.

• 1947: CDC paid Emory University a token $10 for 15 acres on Clifton Road in Atlanta — the land that is now CDC's headquarters.
• The center expanded to cover all communicable diseases, and to give practical help to state health departments when they asked for it.
• Medical epidemiologists were scarce in those early years, but disease surveillance became the cornerstone of CDC's service to the states — and over time changed the practice of public health.

Today

CDC is now one of the major operating components of the Department of Health and Human Services, and recognized as the nation's leading agency for health promotion, prevention and preparedness. Its timelines trace the achievements between.

Sources

Based on "Our History – Our Story" from the David J. Sencer CDC Museum, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a work of the United States government in the public domain.