CDC chief promises new look at inquiry
Rep. Murphy raised VA issue
The new head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy that she would “look into” why the CDC had to correct a journal article about the Legionnaires’ outbreak at the Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System.
That promise, delivered Tuesday by Brenda Fitzgerald, the former head of the Georgia Department of Public Health who was just appointed to the CDC on July 7, came after Mr. Murphy gave her a copy of the Post-Gazette’s July 23 article that examined why the CDC corrected the journal article — a rare and embarrassing move for researchers.
“The first thing I did was hand her [the Post-Gazette’s] latest article,” Mr. Murphy said in a phone interview after the meeting. “She told me she’s going to look into this.”
Dr. Fitzgerald told Mr. Murphy she was unfamiliar with the issue, but Mr. Murphy explained that it was an important one that deserved additional attention.
The CDC was forced to make a correction to the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal article last month after the Post-Gazette ran a two-part series in December about the CDC’s investigation and reporting of the outbreak.
The Post-Gazette’s stories demonstrated that the CDC’s investigators and leaders held biases before they began the 2012 investigation of the Legionnaires’ outbreak at the Pittsburgh VA. The outbreak sickened 22 veterans and led to the deaths of six of them. Those biases led to questionable investigation techniques and alteration of data in the journal article from what was originally discovered during the investigation.
“This is a huge breach of science [in an outbreak] that led to deaths,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview.
The investigators and leaders openly expressed bias against the copper-silver ionization system that the Pittsburgh VA used to combat Legionella in its water, as well as bias against two former VA researchers who are experts on Legionnaires’, Victor Yu and Janet Stout.
The bias was shown through dozens of emails exchanged by CDC officials that were obtained by the Post-Gazette through a Freedom of Information Act request.
After the December series in the Post-Gazette, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., called on the CDC to investigate what the Post-Gazette discovered in the emails. Mr. Murphy joined him in that request.
The CDC said in an email in recent weeks that during its own investigation, “we reviewed our scientific processes and conclusions from the Pittsburgh VA outbreak. During the review, we did find a small data error in the CID article and the Journal published an errata. This does not change the findings or conclusions and the investigation is closed.”
Said Mr. Murphy: “Now that we have a new CDC head, I hope we get further with her than we did” previously.