CDC-funded program combines ID fellowship with 2-year EIS rotation
A new CDC-funded program will combine an infectious diseases fellowship with a stint in the agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, the Infectious Diseases Society of America announced.
“For a number of years, I think [members] have realized a lot of ID physicians are interested in both,” Anna Guggenheim, MPH, IDSA’s associate director of fellowships, told Healio. “The idea of the program is to create more of a clear pathway and to try to simplify things for applicants, to streamline the application process as much as possible.”
The program begins with a 2-year ID fellowship, followed by a 2-year stint in the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program. Applicants will apply for both at the same time.
“Applicants who are accepted will know what their plans are for the next 4 years of their career,” Guggenheim said. “We are working out the details to try to make it a strong option for people to be able to stay near the ID fellowship location for their EIS placement.”
Participating ID training programs will be selected soon through an application process. Six to eight programs are expected to participate.
Applications for the program are expected to open in the spring of 2023, with placement in ID programs by July 2024. To read more about the application process and eligibility, click here.
Perspective
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The program will integrate and be easier for all parties — for those who are training in infectious diseases who have a public health inclination, and also wish to be EIS officers with the CDC — to have an integrated application process that will make it much smoother for the applicant.
It will help the fellowship program attract people with those interests because obviously, the fellowships that want to do this have a public health interest already. It will help the state health departments, who have to compete periodically to attract EIS officers, because this is all going to be very integrated now. It'll be less work for them. And obviously, it will be less work for the applicant.
The intention is to have these initial combined programs — the fellowship and the state health department that's going to be their host during their 2 EIS years — located in the same city, so the applicants don't have to move.
I can tell you that here at Vanderbilt, we have applied for one of these. We’re in Nashville —that's the location of the state health department — and we have had a long association with our state health department. As a matter of fact, one of our recent fellow graduates went to the EIS and was assigned right here to the Tennessee health department. So, we actually have informally shown that this sort of thing can work.
It will help the CDC in one specific regard. If you look at the classes of EIS officers for the last 10-plus years, you will see that physicians are really a minority in those classes. You have lots of PhDs, epidemiologists, veterinarians, nurses — I think they even have a pharmacist now — but the EIS program has had difficulty recruiting doctors into that program. And, of course, we want that program to be enriched with doctors.
Originally when I was an EIS officer, which was back when the draft was active, we all had to fulfill our selective service obligations. One of the ways you could fulfill it was to earn a commission in the United States Public Health Service. I was fortunate enough to get in. The class was almost all doctors — not completely, but almost all — but that's certainly changed over the decades.
As we train the next generation and the next generation of public health leaders, we want some physicians among them. This will help the EIS program in that regard.
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