Dr. Richard Besser is getting as much air time on cable TV these days as Patrick Buchanan and Chris Matthews.
Only he’s better looking than either of them. And he never raises his voice or sounds alarmist, despite having to give daily updates on the spreading swine flu.
Richard E. Besser
The acting director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control managed to sound smooth Thursday even when correcting the vice president of the United States. “I think flying is safe,” he said. “Going on the subway is safe. People should go out and live their lives.”
After 13 years at the CDC tracking E coli infections and preparing for health emergencies, Besser, 49, landed in the top job in late January on the day after Barack Obama’s inauguration.
It has fallen to him to be the government’s chief spokesman during the swine flu outbreak largely because so many of the administration’s top health jobs remain unfilled. Kathleen Sebelius was confirmed only Tuesday by the Senate as health and human services secretary.
Besser told the Washington Post that weekly stints in the 1990s as a television health reporter in San Diego helped him develop his reassuring bedside manner.
“It made me comfortable being around cameras,” he said.
He’s also comfortable turning on a dime. In 2005, on the morning he started his last job as the CDC’s head of emergency response, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast.
“You learn how to talk to people in a setting of crisis, and not be overly reassuring,” he told the New York Times. “You try to empower people” with information.
In some ways, everything Richard Besser has done up to this point has prepared him for this role, from studying economics at Williams College, to training as a pediatrician in Baltimore, to his years as a disease detective in the U.S and around the world.
After college, he traveled the world for a year and “became sensitized to the enormity of global health disparities,” he wrote in his CDC biography.
After receiving his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986 and completing a pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, he took a job for a year in Bangladesh at a diarrheal disease research center, and learned about disease detective work.
“It clicked,” Besser told the Times. “I knew what I wanted to do.”
Besser joined the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service in 1991 and was dispatched to Boston to investigate an outbreak of E. coli infections that had left six children seriously ill.
After three months of painstaking work that involved collecting deer droppings from apple orchards, he pinpointed unpasteurized apple cider as the source.
While the agency was reportedly unhappy with how long the investigation took, Besser did more than solve a medical mystery – he also met his wife, Jeanne Besser, now a food writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with whom he has two sons.
“I am probably the only EIS officer to go out on an outbreak and come back with a spouse!” he wrote in his CDC biography. “We were profiled on a TV show called Vital Signs, where they reenacted the outbreak and how it led to our romance.”
Besser comes from a family of overachievers with a tradition of public service. His father, Dr. William Besser, spent summers volunteering on an Indian reservation His older brother, Mitchell Besser, runs Mothers2Mothers, an agency with branches all over the world that tries to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the AIDS virus. His younger brother, Andrew is a medical malpractice and personal injury attorney in Los Angeles
So far, he has gotten high marks from the medical community for giving people information without inspiring panic. He has explained complex issues in simple terms. He has even acknowledged not knowing many answers.
“I have been impressed with him,” Dr. David Satcher, a former director of the disease control centers told the Post. “He has been very transparent about what they know and don’t know.”
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
1 Comments
#1. Vitals 05.07.2009
Read more about Dr. Richard Besser at Spotlight.Vitals.com
Leave a Comment