Taking medical mysteries to prime time

Could a new television series do for public health physicians what "ER" has done for emergency doctors?

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. Aug. 23/30, 2004.

Washington -- The scene: In dramatic fashion, the federal government's crack team of disease detectives sets off to solve yet another medical mystery threatening the public health.

The team's leader, Stephen Connor, MD, boards a National Institutes of Health helicopter that sets down beside a Little League field in Bethesda, Md., where he had been watching his son play baseball. Summoned by an urgent cell phone call, he's off to New York City where blue patients have started arriving at a hospital.

Hold on a minute. This sounds a bit like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Epidemic Intelligence Service.

In a sense, it is -- with a little touch of small-screen ingenuity. A new television series called "Medical Investigation" is to begin airing next month on NBC, based on the work of this elite CDC corps of investigators.

If "Medical Investigation" catches on, it could greatly elevate public health and the profile of the typical EIS epidemiologist, despite the fact that in TV-land, these medical investigators work as part of the NIH based in Bethesda, rather than the CDC in Atlanta. Still, EIS investigators could suddenly take on some of the gutsy glamour of the show's stars.

"If the general sense they give of what EIS is all about is reasonably accurate, I suppose it can't hurt. And it certainly could make the public more aware of public health," said Neal Nathanson, MD, associate dean of the University of Pennsylvania's global health programs. Dr. Nathanson spent two years in the EIS program, which inspired his lifelong interest in virus research.