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Public health then and now: celebrating 50 years of MMWR at CDC : introduction
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October 7, 2011
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Source: MMWR Suppl. 2011 Oct 7;60(4):2-6
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Description:This supplement of MMWR celebrates the 50th anniversary of CDC's first publication of MMWR on January 13, 1961 (Figure 1). MMWR was not new in 1961, but it was new to CDC, an agency that itself had been founded only 15 years earlier, in 1946 (1). The longer History of MMWR traces back to July 13, 1878, when the first predecessor of MMWR, called simply The Bulletin of the Public Health, was inaugurated. The Bulletin was established in accordance with the first National Quarantine Act, passed by Congress 2 months earlier. The Act ordered the Surgeon General of the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service to begin publishing abstracted disease reports collected from U.S. consuls in foreign lands to alert U.S. quarantine officials about what Diseases could be expected among passengers arriving on steamships (2,3). In the 83 years from 1878 to 1961, MMWR went through several incarnations. By 1952, the publication had its current name and was being published by the National Office of Vital Statistics, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In 1960, CDC's renowned chief of Epidemiology, Alexander D. Langmuir, decided that MMWR should be transferred to CDC (then known as the Communicable Disease Center). After much discussion, and as Langmuir later said in an interview, "all sorts of pulling out teeth by the roots without anesthesia and all kinds of internal frictions," in 1960, MMWR was transferred to CDC (4).
In 2009, as the 50th anniversary of MMWR loomed, the MMWR Editor (F.E.S.) began discussions with leaders at CDC and the MMWR Editorial Board about how best to commemorate this date. Members of the Board, editors, and friends of MMWR offered many good ideas. In the end, the most persuasive idea was to celebrate the 50th anniversary simply by doing what MMWR has done best for 5 decades at CDC: publish articles of high value to its readers. The title of the supplement is "Public Health Then and Now: Celebrating 50 Years of MMWR at CDC." The supplement's guest editors (F.E.S., K.S.K., L.M.L., S.B.T.) selected a cadre of expert authors who have long experience in their respective fields of public health---enough to enable them to look back over the past 50 years and trace the most important influences and developments. The guest editors asked the authors to answer three key questions. What was the state of the art in 1961? How did it develop through 50 years into its present form? What does the future hold? Thus, with few exceptions, the 16 articles that make up this supplement are not meant to be about MMWR but instead are meant to trace the development of key areas of public health through the 50-year era of MMWR at CDC.
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