Moses Lake native accepted to CDC program

ATLANTA — Physician Elisabeth Hesse is training for the kind of job they make movies about.

Hesse is a Moses Lake native and 2001 graduate of Moses Lake High School. She is one of 70 to 80 people nationwide selected for the 2017 class of Epidemic Intelligence Service officers.

The two-year program is taught by the Centers for Disease Control.

In fact, the 1995 film “Outbreak” was the fictional story of an EIS investigation. “So yes, it is a job they make movies about, literally,” she said.

The job is “essentially to respond to disease outbreaks,” she said. In her training she will be focusing on immunization safety.

Vaccines, of course, go through extensive testing before they are approved for general use. But even the most extensive testing and trials can’t anticipate every reaction of every potential patient. Hesse cited Guillain-Barre Syndrome as an example. It’s a rare disease – about two cases for every 100,000 people – that attacks the nervous system. In rare cases, this disease has been associated with flu vaccinations.

“You don’t see these rare outcomes until after the virus has hit the market,” she said. It will be her job to figure out if a vaccination caused a reaction, and if the answer is yes, how it may have happened.

Anybody, physician or otherwise, can report a possible vaccination reaction, Hesse said, and data comes in from all over the country. The EIS teams analyze to the data to find incidents that could justify further investigation.

The EIS program gets a lot of applications, but 70 to 80 people are accepted each year, said Alex Lampasona, public affairs officer for the CDC. Hesse said she heard about the program before she entered medical school at Ohio State University. “It was one of those things that was always in the back of my mind.”

Hesse said a career in medicine was always her goal. “I always wanted to be a doctor, as far back as I can remember." She was on the Science Olympiad team at Frontier Middle School and placed in national competition. She credited her MLHS biology and chemistry teachers with supporting her interest in science.

The aspect of medicine that really attracted her, she said, was the idea of keeping people from getting sick, rather than treating them after they are sick. That increased her interest in a career in public health.

She joined the U.S. Army, which allowed her to go medical school; her residency was at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. She served on active duty from 2009 to 2017, following disease around the world, from Africa to Ukraine, Kuwait to South America. Her job was to teach techniques to improve public health, and assess the possibility of disease on U.S. Army bases.

She completed her active duty service earlier this year and joined the U.S. Public Health Service.

The work is both challenging and “very interesting,” she said – and very demanding. She might stay with the CDC when the two-year program is completed, or work for another public health agency, she said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.