Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H., who became director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2009 and has worked to control health threats from infectious diseases worldwide, will be this year’s Harvard School of Public Health Centennial Commencement speaker on Thursday, May 29.
From 2002 to 2009, as commissioner of the New York City Health Department, Frieden directed the effort that reduced the number of smokers in the city by 350,000 and cut teen smoking by half. “I’ve treated so many adults who are desperate—desperate—to get off tobacco. They all started as kids,” he said recently in the Los Angeles Times. “I see the industry getting another generation of our kids addicted. To me, as a physician, when 1.78 million of our high school kids have tried an e-cigarette and a lot of them are using them regularly…that’s like watching someone harm hundreds of thousands of children.”
During his tenure, New York City also became the first place in the United States to eliminate trans fats from restaurants and require some restaurants to post calorie information prominently.
Immediately upon his arrival as CDC director in 2009, Frieden launched the first-ever nationwide anti-tobacco media campaign and prioritized CDC’s efforts to reduce infections in healthcare settings. The latter effort cut some life-threatening infections by a third or more, according to his biography on the CDC website.
Recently Frieden joined experts in public health, epidemiology, virology, clinical medicine, and related specialties to participate in a two-day event sponsored by the World Health Organization to certify Southeast Asia free of polio. “There are still three places in the world where wild poliovirus has never stopped killing and disabling children: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria,” Frieden wrote in a column for the Huffington Post in April. “As we continue to eradicate polio nation by nation, it is a victory for the entire world. And when it is done, it will be the ultimate in equity and sustainability because it will be for every single child in the world and it will be forever.”
