Dr. Stephanie Dopson

Dr. Stephanie A. Dopson

Q: This is Sam Robson here with Dr. Stephanie Dopson. Today is December--what is it?

DOPSON: Eighteenth.

Q: Eighteenth, 2015, and we're here in the audio recording booth at the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] Roybal Campus in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm interviewing Stephanie today as part of the Ebola [Response] Oral History Project. We'll be discussing her life and career, but especially focusing in on her experiences of her response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Stephanie, for the record, could you please state your name and your current position with CDC?

DOPSON: Sure. My name is Dr. Stephanie Anne Dopson and I am a lead public health analyst in the Influenza Coordination Unit in the Office of Infectious Diseases.

Q: Can you tell me first when you were born and where you grew up?

DOPSON: Sure. I was born April 9th, 1972, in Atlanta, Georgia, and my parents 00:01:00moved to the suburbs actually the day I was born. My mother went into labor the day of the move. I was raised in the suburb outside of Atlanta.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about growing up?

DOPSON: Sure. I grew up in a great place with a great school system with really good teachers and was always involved in extracurricular activities, which I think helped me figure out what I wanted to do as an adult. My senior year of high school, I applied to several colleges in the state of Georgia and South Carolina and in New York. For any eighteen-year-old, New York is always considered the place of excitement. When Bard College offered me a--it was 00:02:00almost a full scholarship, I chose to go to New York, which is like a different country once you move there from the South. For a city girl it was very different being in--the closest thing was a village, the Village of Red Hook. I met a lovely lady who was a friend of the family who would invite me in to New York City, which at the time I did not understand how that was really going to affect me in the future. But I would go in for Thanksgiving and for other occasions and really got to know and love New York City and all that it had to offer. That would prove to be very impactful about ten years later.

Q: Backing up for a bit, can you tell me a bit about your parents?

DOPSON: Sure. My father was an engineer and my mother actually helped start a college. It was a two-year college and then later became a university. I was one of the few females, little girls growing up with a working mother because that was not really done at the time. My mother was actually one of two women in her own high school class that had a master's degree. That was always my vision. That was always what was modeled for me, is an educated woman. I was in a university setting, so being on a campus, the Clifton campus, is very familiar to me because it was where I ran around when I was growing up because my mother worked in that particular setting and in education. For me, going to college was 00:04:00just the starting point. I didn't think I would get a doctorate at the time, but I was around people who had PhDs and we were in a very academic setting, and it very much is similar to CDC.

Q: Great. What were some of your earlier interests up through high school?

DOPSON: I began taking piano lessons when I was four. I was the youngest student of my piano teacher, and I still keep in touch with her today. She's almost eighty. That gave me a love of music and it also taught me discipline, you know, "Practice, practice, practice" is what she would always say. I did piano competitions and I took ballet and tap and jazz. When I was growing up, girls weren't really into sports then. They didn't really have a lot of those 00:05:00opportunities besides gymnastics. But we were in ballet, tap and jazz and then also Girl Scouts. Made a lot of potholders in Girl Scouts, learned some other things, etiquette was a good--were good lessons. I wish I had learned things where I could be more handy like they did in Boy Scouts, but at the time we were making potholders. I was in that for three years, and in high school I tried out for the color guard and was in the color guard as part of the band. For clubs, I was in the Beta Club, which was academic, based on your grades. Those activities really kept me busy, and I always worked in the summer and I think that was really helpful for me to figure out what it is that I wanted to do.

Q: What did you do in the summer?

DOPSON: I worked with handicapped kids, and so they really have a special place in my heart. I did that every summer for quite a number of years through the Parks and Recreation program, and that was a really good experience for me.

Q: Were you a single child or did you have siblings?

DOPSON: No, I have a sister. She's an attorney and this actually is a great story. I was trying to decide where to go to graduate school. She was trying to decide where to go to undergraduate because we're four years apart. I had decided to go to graduate school at Tulane [University] about two months after she had decided to go to Tulane for undergraduate. So we actually went through our four years together at Tulane University and lived not that far from each other.

Q: Wow. Can you tell me a little bit about your college experience in New York?

DOPSON: It was a really good education. Very hard. I had one professor who had won the Pulitzer Prize in literature. Her first name was Elizabeth [Frank], I don't remember her last name. It was the first time that I was really on my own, and I think that's a good growth and learning experience for young women, to have to figure out how to live on their own independently. It was an interesting experience. Very different from the South. That part was very difficult.

Q: Can you tell me more about that?

DOPSON: There are no warm fuzzies with New Yorkers. [laughs] There are none. In the South, you're used to talking with people. Even when I would go back and 00:08:00visit, it seemed in New York the only people that talked to each other were the southerners. And it snowed, which was also new for me, on a consistent basis. It was cold from September until I left in May. When you're used to being able to wear--not having to wear a coat all the time, it was different. I think there was a big decision in deciding to go to Tulane for my many years of graduate school.

Q: For sure. What did you major in in college?

DOPSON: I started out in biology, but it was a liberal arts college and they really encouraged you to have the literature and the history and the science. It was really split between those areas. They wanted you to have the education in literature and in the arts and humanities in addition to science. I had some 00:09:00very good professors.

Q: Can you tell me about some of them?

DOPSON: One of them's name was Paul, and he was just a really good literature professor and really opened up, continued the expansion and knowledge of the literature that had started with my high school English teacher, Martha Lam. It also finished honing in good writing skills, which I think is becoming a lost art. That has helped me as a professor at Georgia State [University], having Ms. Lam and then the professor at Bard College to really hone in my writing. It encouraged me to be able to have the confidence to publish when I came to CDC and I think if I had not had that background, I'm not sure that I would have 00:10:00been as confident that I could do that. Then really trying to help the next generation, as a professor now, have those skills themselves.

Q: What drew you to your major?

DOPSON: I come from a family of doctors, and so that was very influential to me. I knew what that path would look like and I knew what it would take to get there. Public health was still very new at that time. There were not that many universities that even--there were [twenty-eight] I think when I applied. Not very many schools of public health at all when I started applying a few years later.

Q: Tell me about coming down to the South again.

DOPSON: I was ready to come back down to the South again. So I finished college at the University of Georgia. I actually transferred my third year, and then I 00:11:00finished up with a degree in anthropology and religion as a minor.

Q: Can you tell me more about that?

DOPSON: Okay. I had decided to transfer and really loved Athens, Georgia. It's a great college town where you can also still get a good education, and I ended up with anthropology as the major. It was very interesting to me and I think that helped me when I went to Africa for Ebola because I had studied so much about other cultures. I ended up with an anthropology major with a combination of biology, and it seemed to fit just from practicality in terms of credit hours. I finished with that and when I came to CDC, there are actually a lot of people 00:12:00who majored in anthropology, so it all really ended up coming together in the end.

Q: Did you have a specific focus in anthro?

DOPSON: No, it was really across cultures. It was a very broad spectrum in terms of education.

Q: So post-graduate school or actually near the end of graduate school, what did you envision yourself doing at that point?

DOPSON: At the end of undergraduate?

Q: Of undergraduate, excuse me.

DOPSON: So the end of undergraduate, I knew I was very interested in clinical social work, and I had started to become very interested in public health because I came to work for Dr. Ira Schwartz in the summers at the Emory AIDS Training Network, which was open for many years until last year. I knocked on their door a couple of summers and finally they let me come and work there 00:13:00during the summer. That was really the beginning, is the influence there. One of the people that I worked for, Kimberly Sessions, is next door at the School of Public Health, and that group of people were very influential. One of them actually had an MSW [Master of Social Work], was a clinical social worker, too, so I was able to visually see how all of that could start fitting together. I worked for them for several summers and then I applied to the School of Social Work the year after I graduated from undergrad. I also worked at an AIDS consortium that was on Ponce de Leon for the time between when I finished undergraduate and then started graduate school. It was really getting the spectrum of public health with nurses and people who specialized in public 00:14:00health, being able to see how all those different specialties worked together, and then that's exactly what happened in Ebola.

Q: So you were working on AIDS essentially during the nineties, when it was still--

DOPSON: Yeah, it was still very much a learning curve at that point in time. It had been about ten years since they had identified the virus and the transmission in the United States. It was still fairly early, the mid nineties.

Q: What was it like?

DOPSON: It was interesting to watch something unfold in terms of programming on how to work with different communities, and that's exactly what we do in public health. I just started doing that after the terrorist attacks with bioterrorism funding.

Q: So tell me about social work school.

DOPSON: It was a decision between NYU [New York University], because I was interested in going back to New York, and the School of Social Work at Tulane. But NYU was very rude to me over the phone in the interview and the people at Tulane were very nice, and that made the decision for me. And then my sister had received a full scholarship there--she received a substantial scholarship. So it really just kind of fell into place.

I loved my time there. New Orleans is community-oriented, which I think Atlanta has really kind of lost. Very southern. People talk to each other in the grocery store very much the way that I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta. I go back 00:16:00there frequently, even now, I'm on the board of directors at Tulane at the School of Public Health. Really just enjoyed my time there. So I started out with an MSW. We had one year of class work and then we started seeing patients. I had an internship at Trinity Counseling and Training Center, and I still actually keep in touch with and stay with my supervisor that I had there, Orissa Arend. I saw people from all different walks of life. We operated on a sliding-[scale fee] and I saw children through adults who were dealing with every imaginable issue. Again, it went back to community, which was the link with the anthropology, what I was experiencing working at the Emory AIDS 00:17:00Training Network, and then later at the AIDS Research Consortium of Atlanta, ARCA, on Ponce de Leon [Avenue]. It was all about community and people, and I really enjoyed that.

I had seen the MSW and MPH [Master of Public Health] matched together, so when I finished the MSW, I applied to the MPH program and then continued on at Tulane for another two years. Joint programs are very popular now. At the time those were just coming into vogue and so you didn't have a lot of that. You really had to do them separately. Now they've gotten much more advanced in terms of having a combined degree program that's not duplicative, but at the time it was separate. I ended up being in New Orleans for four years. I worked in several housing projects or developments with low-income kids. I saw children in my 00:18:00practice, and then we would go to local schools and do therapy with some of the students that had been identified that really could benefit from clinical counseling. I was very busy between school work and working in the housing developments, one of which existed until just a few months ago, and really became very involved in the community of New Orleans. I really just enjoyed that.

Q: After four years, did you leave New Orleans, then?

DOPSON: I did. I was actually going to Guatemala to finish my last semester, and before I left I mailed three applications to the ASPH [Association of Schools of Public Health] fellowship programs. When I got back three weeks later, I had a 00:19:00request for three interviews. I did three interviews in one week, and on that Friday, I was offered a position in the Division of Oral Health in the chronic disease prevention program.

Q: Had you been kind of moving in that direction?

DOPSON: It takes a very long time to set up a clinical practice, and I was starting to see that. I had interest in both areas and even though I think public health still does not incorporate mental health, the mental health component, the way that I would've envisioned seventeen years into my career, I still see them linked. When I did my dissertation, it was very clear that it was linked. This was a great opportunity, and so I packed up a moving truck and then 00:20:00had a friend drive me to Atlanta.

Q: What happens when you get here?

DOPSON: I had two really great supervisors who really set the stage for me even considering staying at CDC after the first year. My vision was I was going to stay for a year in Atlanta, which at this point I'm coming back ten years later, was very different than the sleepy southern town that I had left. We had faired very well during the downturn economically, and so a lot of people had moved here and it was just very different and stayed very different. My vision was to stay here for a year and then to go back and either work in public health and do clinical practice on the side, or some mix of that. But I had Dr. Scott Presson and Dr. Bill Moss, and they immediately sent me up to Bethesda, [Maryland], to work on the Surgeon General's report on oral health, which is why I had been 00:21:00offered the fellowship. There had never been a Surgeon General's report on oral health and I was not an expert in that area. I had seen a lot from just being in Guatemala, where there was no oral health care, but they were really good supervisors to me and gave me a lot of opportunity and mentored me very early in my career. Actually, Dr. Presson did a letter of reference for my doctorate application and came to my doctoral party. They were just very influential and supportive of me in my early career. They offered me a second year, and then at that point I applied for a fellowship that was linked with a full-time position, what we call FTE [full-time equivalent], and was hired for that position in the 00:22:00Division of Diabetes Translation.

Q: Was that kind of a shift though? It sounds like diabetes was--

DOPSON: Still in chronic disease prevention, and we had done a joint project with them on looking at the link between oral healthcare and diabetes. In the last ten years we've really started to make a lot of links in terms of chronic disease prevention. That was when we had a dentist in the Division of Oral Health who was very interested in what this link may be with diabetes. I got to know the staff in Diabetes Translation--several of whom are still good colleagues and friends of mine to this day. We had come in at about the same time--or we're all about the same age, and we're early in our careers, and just a really good, supportive group of people.

Q: That's come up a few times now, the importance of community. When I say that, 00:23:00what does that bring to mind?

DOPSON: Well, I'm from the South and I think that what was modeled for me growing up is that sense of community with your neighbors, caring for other people. I'm also a Christian and am very involved in the Christian church. To me, that's important, and I think some of that has been lost today with people being separated from families. It was really lovely to see in Africa the sense of family and community and all those strong bonds that really make a difference in your life.

Q: Then your entire direction of your career, the entire trajectory is about caring for people in the broader community.

DOPSON: Right. And then 9/11 happened and my whole career direction changed.

Q: Tell me about that.

DOPSON: I think no one could envision what was going to happen that day, and I still remember like where I was sitting, at what stop sign in the Virginia Highlands, as I was cutting through to come to work. The first plane--golly, it's still very emotional all these years later. The first plane had gone into the towers and then fifteen minutes later the second plane hit, and I just remember where I was in my car and I just--there was this sense of something is 00:25:00very wrong but I didn't realize at the time that nothing was going to be the same. So I went to work. We were in lockdown, which was very distressing because people just wanted to really be home with their families. Parents are calling their children at work, trying to make sure, where is everybody? They had to evacuate the daycare here on Clifton Campus. We had a team, some of whom I knew, that went up to work in New York right away. They were on the first plane, the only plane that was allowed in the air.

A few weeks later, the anthrax attacks happened. I was actually on vacation over Christmas, and I talked to--I was very interested in going up to work in New 00:26:00York on the anthrax attacks, and they were interested in me going. I was talking with Sherrie [M.] Bruce, who was the chief of staff for Ebola, and Joe [Joseph M.] Posid, who works in her same group to this day. Joe Posid said to me--I talked to him on Christmas Eve. He said, "If you're interested, we want you to go, we're going to have you on a plane the day after Christmas." So I came back from vacation, and I was on a plane the day after Christmas to work in New York. I had a fabulous team lead in New York City and in New Jersey. In New York City, her name was Dr. Stephanie [H.] Factor. She was incredible. We took the anthrax--we were educating the postal workers because the vaccine--we were giving them the vaccine if they wanted it--excuse me, not vaccine but 00:27:00prophylaxis, Cipro [ciprofloxacin] or doxy [doxycycline]. It was really surreal because the management of the postal service wasn't talking to the employees. It was a very tense environment.

We would come out at night and there would be news crews all over the city block as we were trying to get back to our hotel. This was my first experience with the news media, who are not necessarily always interested in reporting it right, or sometimes even when you're giving them the right information, it doesn't come across correctly. When we got back to the hotel, which was covered in fleas--that was always an interesting side story, is that they couldn't get a hotel under per diem and so we were kind of in the flea hotel, and they had already moved everybody I think once. People were getting fleabites and all 00:28:00that. But you get back to the hotel and it was a scare tactic, it wasn't accurate information. But that was a good introduction to me for the media and how important our media communications people are, that public health has a spectrum of specialties and they all have to work together, which is what happened in Ebola. We were a team doing different things and it was all important.

Then I went up to New Jersey and worked for a lady who just now retired two years ago, Vicky [Victoria] Kiprios, and she was also very wonderful. A very different setting, a very different feel than what was going on in New York. I came back and they asked me to go back because they were doing two rounds. I 00:29:00went back and once again spent time in New York City and then again in New Jersey and then came back. In that period of time, Congress had met, was in session, and they decided to allocate funding--$1.3 billion to be precise--for the states to build up their bioterrorism capacity. I applied for the job that summer. Stephanie Factor had actually called and she did a very lovely reference for me. I was the youngest person hired on the team and it just changed my whole career, and that's what I've done since then is bioterrorism. It's terrorism preparedness, bioterrorism preparedness and then pandemic flu, but it's all in the same continuum and spectrum and I still work with a lot of the same people.

The early years were very crazy, and that is really the only way to describe it. Just as the people who work on Ebola have a bond, whether I run into them on the weekend or I run into them here, there is a bond that you can explain, and it is very much that way with the early people who worked in the early days of terrorism preparedness. I still am very close to my boss from that time, Karen Willis. We have an annual lunch with somebody else that was on our team after Christmas. We've done that every year since we've not been working together. We just scheduled that for January 5th.

We were building the ship at the same time we were trying to drive the ship because we were looking at epidemiology preparedness. What should that look 00:31:00like? We were concerned about water attacks, attacks to our water supply system, the laboratories. I spent a lot of time--and this is where the science, the background came in from college, is that I was not a lab expert but I could follow what my lab experts, Emory [L.] Meeks and David [S.] Bressler, were telling me. When we were spending, I was approving a lot of the items for the lab. Laboratories were expanded--what we could pay for, what could actually go into them. A lot of that laboratory capacity was being built up with bioterrorism preparedness money, looking at training the workforce specifically to respond, which ended up helping us with Hurricane Katrina, with the floods that have happened, with Ebola when people were coming back into the country. Those were some of the main areas that we were focused on and we were getting 00:32:00trained ourselves in determining what is it that was considered preparedness, what is it that we should be requiring the states to do that will enhance our preparedness.

It was really a circle back to me from Bard College. I really felt a connection with New York because of the time I had spent there and going back for the anthrax attacks, and then with what had happened on 9/11, which is always still a very hard anniversary for me. We went and saw Ground Zero when we were on break. I went with a lady named Brenda who was on our team and it was just incomprehensible. It's like what you learn in science, it just seemed to not 00:33:00matter--I mean, it just boggled, what you were looking at. It was almost like you couldn't even absorb it. But very close to the team, even when I see people, Harold Pietz, who was on our team and was kind enough to take the nightshift during the anthrax attacks. I now work with him. He's the deputy in the Program Services Branch for Division of State and Local Readiness. Rendy Bacon was on my team and she was about my age and also a very close connection. When you see each other, there's just that bond from going through something like that, and it was very much the same for Ebola.

Q: So what happens in the late 2000s and the early 2010s?

DOPSON: In 2007, I was asked to interview with the Influenza Coordination Unit. 00:34:00They had a need for somebody to come help them on some specific work, and I was very fortunate, again, to be surrounded with good leaders. I started working for Toby [William T.] Crafton and then Dr. Steve [Stephen C.] Redd, who is now the head of our preparedness group at CDC. And was taking that pandemic readiness, which was very similar to bioterrorism preparedness, just with an infectious disease component now. But that was good for me in terms of my career because now I was able to really specialize more in the infectious disease area and meet the people that work in that particular specialty area. It was very good that I moved over when I did because--I moved over, I did a detail in '07, moved over 00:35:00there permanently in '08, and then H1N1 happened a few months later and we were in the Emergency Operations Center for exactly a year almost. And loved working with the people in the Division of Emergency Operations. I really got to know another area of how logistics work and how the operations staff work and how our watch staff, when they answer the calls that come in to CDC, I think they are tremendous. We really benefited after the terrorist attacks--a lot of the staff are ex-military and they brought, I thought, a skill set that we needed and you're not taught in public health, but very much incorporates emergency response. It allowed me--every time I go into the EOC [Emergency Operations 00:36:00Center], it allows me--I know the people, I know how the systems work, I can bring the science component to it. I had actually just sat for my comprehensive exams the month before with my doctorate and I actually found out and ran into the Joint Information Center where some of my colleagues were from the Influenza Coordination Unit and said, "I passed my comprehensive exams, I can now continue on with a dissertation!" So all of that was going on at the same time.

Q: What were you getting your doctorate in?

DOPSON: I had applied to Tulane after Hurricane Katrina, which I had also responded to. They had flown me to Houston. I applied right after Hurricane 00:37:00Katrina and was accepted into the 2007 cohort. They thought I was not going to have to sit to take those dreadful GRE [Graduate Record Examination] exams, but they couldn't get to my old exams because the building was flooded and so they couldn't even get into the building to get to the floor to see if I wouldn't have to take the GRE exams again, which are always not pleasant to take. But I had to take those again and was accepted subsequently after that and had started on the doctorate path in 2007 and sat for my comprehensive exams. In early 2009, I went and worked with the Pacific territories on their pandemic influenza planning and had taken some subject matter experts with me, and then I came back 00:38:00and H1N1 happened.

Q: What did you decide to write your dissertation about?

DOPSON: I decided to write in on Katrina. There were two universities that were given permission to collect data. One of them was Harvard [University] and the other one was Tulane. They were each given a grant through NIH [National Institutes of Health], and so I worked with one of the principal investigators. I had a slice of the data that I was allowed to use for my dissertation. Of course, I'm very bonded to New Orleans and really have a love for that city and for the people in the city and very much wanted to see, okay, in terms of preparedness, where are we? It was very much a manmade disaster. The water came but the pipes had burst and were not working and the whole city flooded. Just looking at issues such as vulnerable populations, looking at PTSD, looking at 00:39:00hostility, how people physically did after the hurricane and looking at where we needed to improve our preparedness from that particular response. Because there were a lot of things that came out that you could apply in general to preparedness in terms of our response and being able to work with the community to look at all the specific issues that they would need to address to be better prepared for whatever is the next flood or hurricane or terrorist attack or whatever is going to be the incident next time.

Q: When were you conferred your doctorate?

DOPSON: I sat for my comps in [2009], defended in December of 2012, and then I was granted the degree in 2013.

Q: And came to Georgia State shortly thereafter?

DOPSON: I started teaching in early 2014.

Q: Teaching what?

DOPSON: A couple of their core classes, health behavior and then public health theory, going back and looking at one of the classes, looking at how you work with the community from the ground up in terms of programming, and so very much related to the work that I would do in the community in New Orleans and the housing developments. I think New Orleans is a really strong community after Hurricane Katrina. It wasn't the government so much that rebuilt the city, it was neighbors helping other neighbors. You would drive down St. Charles Avenue and you would see a church, you know, fifty-nine houses rebuilt, and there would 00:41:00be teams of people that would be put together from churches that would go to another part of the city and help rebuild a house. It was going to take over a decade, and that's exactly what has turned out to transpire. It's taken a long time to rebuild the city.

Q: So getting to Ebola, tell me about learning about the epidemic.

DOPSON: I had a wonderful colleague who I met when she came to work with me on my team during H1N1, Kimberly [A.] Slaughter. And then Kimberly [C.] Dills, who works for Tom [Thomas R.] Frieden now, we actually sent her to work with the Virgin Islands because they were having a lot of issues in terms of being able 00:42:00to vaccinate and do everything else on top of their regular work. Kimberly Slaughter then asked her to come back and work with me on Haiti cholera. She and I worked very well together. I knew I could tell her what needed to be done and then she could go do it and I didn't have to worry about it. She returned the favor for Ebola. She actually used to work in the group that handled Ebola at CDC. She had been pulled in in early July. She called me in mid-July and said, "I need you over here to help with the response." We understand what needs to be built up. I was the technical specialty unit lead during H1N1 and she was the lead for that for Ebola in the early part of the response. She pulled me over 00:43:00and I started working with her on deployments.

Tom Frieden had stated that we were going to send a hundred people overseas within thirty days, and so that really became our focus. We worked with Dr. Diana Blue and then Rachel [N.] Avchen, who is now the head of a branch in the Division of State and Local Readiness. She moved over during Ebola. We sat as a group and started going through EIS [Epidemic Intelligence Service] officers. A new class had just come in. A lot of them wanted to go out. Looking at volunteers. We had to go through the resumes, see who could handle the situation as it was at that particular point in time, and then do all the processing of people that has to happen for them to get out the door to be deployed. It was 00:44:00very comfortable because I had done a lot of responses at this point. Hurricane Katrina, I was in the EOC for sixteen months working on polio eradication. I know how logistics and operations work, and I know who to go to if I have a question, and so it was wonderful working with them. We were working on weekends, we worked very long hours. It kind of threw me back to some of the early days of bioterrorism where it was just you were trying to get everything in place so you could send people out the door to do the response and at the same time building up the response in the Emergency Operations Center. I started out on the international team working specifically with the people who were 00:45:00volunteering, sorting through them, putting them on specific teams and then working with logistics and operations to make sure everything was taken care of for them to actually be deployed. It was fun when I was actually deployed because I could have actually sent over some of the people that I ended up working with, so that part was fun.

Q: When did that transition happen?

DOPSON: I had been talking with them about it--I had not worked internationally before in Africa. I had worked with Canada and Mexico while working in terrorism preparedness because we were looking at cross-border preparedness with Canada and Mexico in laboratory, surge capacity, surveillance. Being able to communicate, if there was something that popped up that looked suspicious, having the surveillance systems that could talk to each other and pick that up. 00:46:00I spent four years working with Canada and Mexico and then had worked in the Pacific with pandemic influenza, but I had not been to Africa. I had traveled to the Middle East, I'd traveled through Europe, but Africa was one continent that I had not really traveled to or worked on. But they did a great job in terms of training us in what we needed. Again, this comes back to public health has a lot of different skill sets that work together and I think that's important, and I did feel very much prepared with the pre-deployment training that was put together that now George [A.] Roark was doing for a very long period of time. When we went over, I really felt like we were given as much information as possible for us to start out to be able to do our jobs. That's important because 00:47:00you really need a team that's cohesive in these type of deployment situations, whether it's the anthrax attacks or Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Texas or whether it's being deployed overseas.

Q: Were you called to go over? Did you volunteer?

DOPSON: I volunteered. Dr. Redd was still my supervisor and was very supportive of his staff being involved in Ebola since it was a priority for the [CDC] director. I was set to go in October and spent a couple of weeks doing a lot of the requirements. There really is a good, thorough system for what you have to--the trainings that you have to take in terms of security trainings. Which with my colleague Kathie [Kathleen M.] Fazekas, who I worked with on polio 00:48:00eradication in the EOC, she ended up being a great example of why that's so important. All the medical clearances, respiratory clearances, and then the half-day pre-deployment trainings. A lot of paperwork and checkmarks that you have to do before you can get on a plane.

Q: Why don't we take a quick break and then come back--

[break]

Q: Let us continue with the story of how you got involved in the Ebola response.

DOPSON: I was scheduled to deploy in October and I flew through Brussels, which again, proved to be fortuitous with what ended up happening with the bombings in Paris a year later. I'd never been to Brussels before--even going through the airport gives you a sense of the country. Then I continued on to Monrovia. You 00:49:00land at about nine o'clock at night, and it really is a throwback to a different time. You come off the plane and then you go into--it's not like the United States where you have security and a nice little turn mill. It's like being shoved off the plane and you're grabbing your luggage as it is coming off of this round circular conveyor belt, and of course, your luggage is so heavy, any help you can get is--because you have packed for a month and one of the things they tell you to pack is the little food bars. That really ends up taking about a third of your luggage. The embassy is great, and they stay until every person 00:50:00is on the van. We had people from other agencies. At that point, DART, who is the Disaster Assistance Response Team out of [Washington] DC, I ended up working a lot with them. Some of their staff had flown in. Pretty much if you're an American, everybody gets into the van, there were two vans, and then they drop you off at different hotels because we weren't all at the same hotel. Our staff were mainly in apartments that the embassy owns and I was at Mamba Point Hotel.

Mamba Point Hotel was very interesting because it's run by Lebanese. Apparently there was a civil war when I was very little, and a lot of Lebanese had fled and one of the places they had come was Liberia. Who would have known? But wonderful 00:51:00hotel staff who really took care of us and I interacted a lot with them. They were very invested in making sure we were comfortable. They had wonderful food. I love Lebanese food and so we always had really good food that sustained you through the day. We were in that hotel and then another Western-style hotel next door. Those hotels were very convenient because everything in Liberia is hilly, so if you are not in good--you're supposed to be in good shape and be able to work in different terrains when you get deployed. But there was this very steep hill that you would have to go up every morning and we were working in the old 00:52:00embassy complex. There was an old embassy and there's a new embassy. The new embassy had been built several years before, and it was even further up and around the bend of another hill. But the old embassy complex was known for being built toward the end of World War II and FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] had come there and it very much looks like a World War II-style complex with the gates and the style of the building and it's concrete. It was pretty much empty until Ebola, except for the residences that were there, and some of the embassy staff stayed in those particular residences.

The other thing that was going on in early October is the military, our American military, had started to come over. In Sierra Leone, it was the British. It was almost like the Western countries had said, we'll go to Sierra Leone if the 00:53:00Americans will go to Liberia, because it was apparently a very different tone from what my colleagues told me in Sierra Leone. It was wonderful having them there. There were units and we were in the upper floor of the building that we worked out of. They were in the bottom two floors and then there was a laundry area that was right at the entrance that we would all share, and they eventually actually paid to replace the washer/dryer so that was very nice. You would often--it was very much a community laundry room. You would often come in and you'd have the military uniforms, you know, you'd rig a string and you'd see them with the pens up as they were trying to draw over their very thick uniform. It was very hot in Africa. I'm a southern lady and I love hot weather, but it 00:54:00was even hotter and you sweat all the time when you're there and I always felt for our military personnel because they had to wear the long sleeves and their uniforms were very thick. Having them there was really wonderful.

It was still very early. Our first group of deployers had gone out, a very small group at the end of July, so we're really very new into the response. It was a throwback to--I mean, just times when there were no computers. We had our laptop. I had no copier. I think we rigged a printer. And there was nothing. You walked in, no supplies, nothing. There was nothing. I was deployed for logistics and I worked with the log staff a lot, and we were doing things like--besides the transportation, we were working with--there were supplies being shipped in 00:55:00and we would work with the embassy to get them out of the warehouse. Then we also had our staff that worked at the airport, our quarantine staff, they were rotating in and coming in from different quarantine stations and also from headquarters. I [had] worked a lot with them since H1N1 on different projects and had been on a detail with quarantine when Ebola had first started and I started working in the EOC. They were trying to do airport screening training and we had nothing, no printers or anything, so I would go to the embassy and work with the staff person there to where we could get things printed locally. They were training local staff on the questionnaires. Some wonderful posters were being developed, we brought some of those back for the CDC Museum. We were 00:56:00also keeping track of the incoming staff, making sure they had a room either in the apartments or at one of the two hotels, and that was being done on an Excel spreadsheet. We didn't have a sophisticated SharePoint site or anything like that for tracking. The colleague that was working on the hotels was doing it on Excel and I was working with the drivers. We're not allowed to drive in other countries, so you hire local drivers, and we had a staff of drivers, usually six to eight. The senior staff would have their own drivers, so Kevin [M.] De Cock always had his own driver and Frank [J.] Mahoney always had his own driver and the rest of us would share. I would work on where our staff had to be, making 00:57:00sure that they got there, in addition to working with the embassy. It was a really great experience to work with the embassy because that was new with me, working with a regional security officer. All of our staff had to have security training when they came in right away. I would work on scheduling that with the RSO [regional security officer]. Then we were also starting to talk about setting up a country office because Liberia did not have a country office just like Sierra Leone, and there's a lot involved in that. I had started in October with the first appointment--getting a sense of what all that would entail in terms of office space, where were people going to sit, etcetera. I worked directly for John [C.] Neatherlin and he was wonderful. He worked under Kevin De Cock, had a lot of international experience, and I learned how to work with 00:58:00Peace Corps through him because we shared drivers.

When our epidemiologists would come into Monrovia, they may stay a few days, but we immediately sent them up-country. Samaritan's Purse, which is run by [William] Franklin Graham [III], they had left, so remember--two of their staff had gotten infected. Dr. [Kent] Brantley had become infected and had been sent out, and so had Nancy Writebol. We did not have Samaritan's Purse and their flight to be able to work with, so we did UN flights because some of our staff would go over to Sierra Leone and Guinea for various reasons. Then we would send staff up-country, and we would have to do that by driving, or we would arrange for them to be dropped by helicopter. The other exciting thing about having the 00:59:00military there is they also brought their very lovely Black Hawk helicopters, which was quite nice. We had several of our epidemiologists who were fortunate enough to ride in the Black Hawk helicopters, and I think they're going to have stories to tell for years to come. Africa, where we were, it was beautiful because we were right on the water, so our complex looked--you could open the window and see the water. The Black Hawk helicopters would come up and down the water and you could just look out. You would hear them and you could look out and see them.

That aspect of it was fun, but the military was there to mainly set up small laboratories and that ended up being its own separate story. But we would sit in--part of our responsibilities is that they would have logistics meeting about 01:00:00twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays and either myself or my other logistics colleague would go and sit in. That really gave you a sense of what was going on with the other Western organizations that were there and then with the Liberian government and the Ministry of Health [and Social Welfare] and then what aspect the military was taking. It really allowed you to see basically who had what stuff and what other people were doing so there wasn't duplication, and you could really leverage the resources that each agency brought while we were there. We also worked a lot, as I mentioned earlier, with the Disaster Assistance [Response] Team, the DART team. They actually had a room in the embassy and they were very helpful in the beginning as we were doing all these flights, UN flights particularly, between the countries because there was a 01:01:00schedule and a methodology to that. We also didn't have cash, so that was interesting. It was being thrown back a century earlier when the US used banks but a lot was cash-based. I was also a sub-cashier and would get cash from the embassy, so when our staff were up-country and needed to pay for things, that we would reimburse them for those efforts.

The epidemiology team lead was Kim [Kimberly A.] Lindblade at the time. She was spectacular, just also really wonderful to work with her. I would work with her on the orientations we would do for new staff. Logistics was responsible for getting the staff in, getting them settled, getting them what they needed, so then they could go out and either do their work in Monrovia or up-country. I 01:02:00would work with her on doing an orientation so you would have a sense of what the scope of the response was at that particular point in time and what each of the teams were doing. I remember very vividly she was very focused on Margibi County and that stood out for me. Then when we thought we had eradicated Ebola and the case popped up in Margibi, I wasn't surpri--I thought of her because I remember whatever she was seeing there must've been, I'm assuming, something [of] concern for her.

For my first rotation there, that was really the scope of what we were doing. Still getting a lot of materials in. The military had arrived, Samaritan's Purse had not yet come back. I was asked to be extended, so ended up spending 01:03:00Thanksgiving there. I had no idea what that was going to look like. There were staff, we were invited, the Americans could come--CDC, in addition to some of the military, could come to the ambassador's residence for Thanksgiving Day. My assumption was that it was just going to be catered. I didn't quite know what it would look like. But you really got to know the embassy staff--well, I did because I was up at the embassy all the time, the new embassy, and go up another hill and around the corner. I was just so touched because what they had done is the embassy staff had basically cooked for all of us. They had just doubled up what they would normally bring for a Thanksgiving dinner. While it was really emotional to not be with my family because Thanksgiving is always a very big 01:04:00holiday--I called them--I get choked up thinking about it. I called them right before I went over so I could talk to them before they were sitting down for their own meal. I had volunteered to serve the people that were coming through the line and really wanted to--our military was there and I just thought it was so lovely. They were also missing their own families and I knew then a lot of them were going to miss Christmas, too. The ambassador gave a really lovely speech and I got some great photos of us, the team that was there, and my Thanksgiving Day conversation was with Dr. Michael [J.] Beach who works in food and waterborne diseases. I had met him during the Haiti earthquake and Haiti cholera and just a really wonderful scientist. He was telling me the story of 01:05:00the case he had worked on that particular week, which maybe one day will be of public record. I think for the circumstance that we were in, they really did just a wonderful job of it being as comfortable as possible. The desserts were American and a lot of American food so the people that were there could have a Thanksgiving meal. It was really lovely.

Q: Can you remind me what date it was that you arrived in the country? Early October was it?

DOPSON: October 22nd.

Q: Oh, late October.

DOPSON: And then I flew back at the end of November, early December.

Q: And originally, though, you were going to leave before Thanksgiving.

DOPSON: I was.

Q: Can you talk about that conversation that you must've had about extending and the decision making?

DOPSON: They had wanted me to stay, and I was really fine staying. One of the things that stood out for me is that everybody was in this together, from the Liberians to--it was just everywhere. You couldn't touch each other, which I actually thought would bother me more than it ended up bothering me. Actually, it's strange then when you come back and people touch you. All of us would talk about--people would, an American would hand you something and you would draw your hand back. Every place, before you walked in, had a container of water and bleach solution and the bleach was supposed to be a certain level. I started sending notes back to the EOC saying, make sure the deployers come with really 01:07:00thick hand cream because bleach causes your hands to peel. But that's how you knew that there was enough of a content in it. There were posters everywhere. I took photos and sent them to the [CDC] Museum. It was just everywhere, the education was everywhere, and I heard from my colleagues in Guinea that that wasn't necessarily happening. But Liberia, I felt like it was a joint effort. Going back to that conversation about community is that you may be in a different country, but it was very much, you know--and that was the messaging, is that we can do things individually to work to make sure that we stop the spread of Ebola. We were very concerned about--our numbers were going down in early December--about there's a lot of movement between the borders. When the 01:08:00countries got divided up after World War II, they have family members on what is designated a border between Liberia and Sierra Leone, so the focus especially in the second deployment was very much what is going on at the border and making sure we picked up any cases that may come across and watching that particular traffic. So I came back for Christmas. It was important for me to be at home with my family for Christmas. And then right before Christmas, Dr. Redd had approved for me to go back, and I very much wanted to go back. I went back in mid-February this time, February 14th through March 27th, and once again went for logistics.

The first deployment, I was very fortunate to be paired with somebody that we worked very well together, Travis Mann. That proved to be fortuitous because 01:09:00that was very helpful to me with the situation that I ended up being in when I got there and found out that the person who was supposed to come and be the second log staff--we were having ice storms in Atlanta and then in DC, and so he couldn't get his visa and kept getting delayed and kept getting delayed.

And then the focus was different. The second tour was definitely different, and not in a bad way. But I could feel--because the cases were really low at that point, the number of new cases--there was a complacency there and it really concerned me. There wasn't bleach in the water. Everywhere before, you would have your temperature checked. They put it to your forehead, and I have pictures of where I was having my temperature taken. There was a laxness there and it 01:10:00really bothered me because I thought we got to this point and I don't want the case count to go back up again. Even at the embassy, where we were supposed to wash our hands, I'd sometimes have to go back in and tell the guards, "There's not enough bleach in here. There's a lot of traffic in and out of the embassy and we need to make sure that there is bleach there."

So I went back, and once again Kevin De Cock was flown in and was the lead this time. Instead of John Neatherlin, I worked for a woman named Pam [Pamela] Dougherty who was based in Thailand with Kim Lindblade, who was the epi [epidemiology] lead the first time. She was also really wonderful to work under because I learned a lot from her. She has been based internationally for many 01:11:00years. We were really at that point where the negotiations were going on and the planning for, okay, our CDC office is going to be in this building, we need to renovate this, all the things that go with that. Working even more with GSO [General Services Office] and their financial office to coordinate all the support requirements for the office space and for the renovations, and then continue to work with the embassy for procurement.

Because the person that was the second log [logistician] flew out, I ended up being by myself. But fortunately, Travis Mann was flying in, and he was there to work on establishing the EOC. But I negotiated with Luis Poblano and Jose Leguana, who I've worked with in the EOC for years, if he could come and help me part-time, because I was going to be supporting over fifty-five people by 01:12:00myself. It kept me up one night, let's just say that. I always wanted to make sure that our staff were getting what they needed and that was really going to be a stretch, and so he was wonderful and stepped in. We had a lot of equipment at that point that we needed to ship back to CDC [Atlanta]. They were doing an inventory at that point and we just needed to get stuff shipped back to them. At that point, a SharePoint site had been set up by a previous deployer so we could do the tracking of the hotels a little bit easier than what we had been doing before. Slowly, we were starting to see the number of staff that were going to be needed actually go down. Because John Neatherlin has been great at training me how to work across with Peace Corps, I worked across with Peace Corps on 01:13:00getting some of our staff up-country. In addition, there was a case in Sierra Leone and two of our staff, epis including David Blackley, were sent over to Sierra Leone on a UN flight very quickly to help with that piece. Samaritan's Purse had come back in at that point, and they were out at ELWA-3 [Eternal Love Winning Africa hospital, Ebola treatment unit] and were always generous if there was an extra space on their flight. We sent an epidemiologist, Cara [C.] Cherry, into a very remote area up-country. It was so interesting to work with all these different agencies, Western agencies and the UN, on all of this coordination and logistics for us to be able to get the cases to go down. We were still sending people up-country. We always sent people in teams of two for safety reasons and 01:14:00for the work. All of that was continuing, but there was definitely more of a focus in Monrovia and more of a focus on what was going on at the border at that point. Brian [D.] Wheeler had come in at that point. He had set up the Haiti office and then he was there to help set up the office in Liberia. We had really shifted a little bit, doing the response still, and then also looking at setting up the country office. It was a great experience to be able to see both of those aspects and to know all the different pieces that have to happen for a country office to actually be set up. I think a couple of other highlights--

Q: Can I ask you what it was like coming home between your first and second?

DOPSON: I was very fortunate. I was very fortunate both times because there were definitely CDC staff that were uninvited for Christmas, uninvited for Thanksgiving and were not allowed to be around the children in the family when they got home. I didn't experience any of that and I was very fortunate. I was very fortunate that--I would have self-quarantined myself if I had felt like--and I knew people that had been sent up-country, that they slept in separate bedrooms from their spouse for the thirty days after, and I understood that. I understood those decisions because I knew where they had been there were a lot of cases. Even if they hadn't been directly exposed, they were going to be precautious to a level that they felt they needed to be. I was pleased with that 01:16:00because I think being around your family when you do come home is very important and I was glad for the time that the agency gave us to do that because it's not just seeing your family, it's practical things like doing all the things like picking up the dry cleaning and doing the laundry and all those things that are essentially put on hold for six weeks while you're gone and friends you haven't visited, etcetera. I definitely had a good transition back into the US. You still had to do the calling in twice a day, or once a day. I got to know the staff at the State of Georgia that was doing all the temperature call-ins very well. I got to know them on a first-name basis, but they were always really 01:17:00lovely to me. You just kind of got into a routine for that period of time.

I think coming back to--I mentioned this earlier, I was fine with my family touching me, but it's really funny, you get into a routine of people not touching you. When people would hand money back to me or they'd hand me a cup, you know, when you go out to eat and you'd say, "I want an iced tea," they hand you the cup and it's like they're looking at you strangely and I'm like, really, I would tell you I came from working on Ebola but you probably are not necessarily interested in hearing that. Actually, the only reaction I had that was--most people when I came back were very supportive--you know, it's great 01:18:00that you went over there. But I think there definitely was still the sense here, and I still get questions now when I do tours as a docent for the museum, people who clearly wanted our staff quarantined somewhere for thirty days. That's not necessarily pleasant to hear because I watched our staff work, going up-country and hauling all your own water and not eating. Everybody's going to get sick with gastrointestinal issues. All of those things that we went through. It's really lovely when people had kind things to say when you got back.

My second tour, I also wanted to mention, I got deployed with somebody I had worked on the international team with, Serena [R.] Fuller. She and I had 01:19:00actually gone to Tulane, we're both Tulane alumni, and we had worked on the international team together from the very beginning. Some of the people from the first tour had come back and were there during our second tour. It was really great to work with colleagues who you had gotten in a rhythm and knew how they worked and you can then do that again the second time.

When I left Liberia, the military, they had been preparing [to leave] and some of them had been there for quite a while. They were planning to leave, and there's a transport plane that transports the military staff back to the United States and I think there had been a hold-up. I think the plane was coming from Afghanistan, there had been a delay, and so they actually ended up leaving after Easter, and they left two days before I did. I really enjoyed having them there. 01:20:00It was really nice to have them in the same complex and be able to interact with them. They did take their Black Hawk helicopters home before Christmas, but most of their staff still remained.

Q: Can you tell me about some of the staff in the military who you especially remember?

DOPSON: The chaplain.

Q: Can you describe him a bit?

DOPSON: There were three of them actually. One was from Kentucky and then the senior pastor, he led the service for the military and just basically was there for the troops. But I think that's really lovely, and I asked about that when I came back. We had out by the airport the HHS [US Department of Health and Human 01:21:00Services] staff. They had their own little ETU [Ebola treatment unit] set up. He would go out and do service for them in late afternoon on Sunday and I just said, "I think it's nice that the military has that because the Public Health Service does not send out a chaplain." But yeah, it was very nice to have them in terms of support, in terms of seeing what they were doing and how that could complement with the work and supplies that they brought in, being able to actually leverage what everybody was bringing from their own group.

I think the other thing that stands out for me, too, I mentioned the hotel staff earlier. I worked a lot with them just to make sure our staff that were coming in [had a room]--because we were sharing, there were a lot of Western agencies there and then you had the news media there. Some mornings it was almost--I 01:22:00mean, looking back, "surreal" is probably not the right word, but there was Laurie Garrett, I believe, who had written a novel. She was there [writing on] Ebola and she liked to go out with Frank Mahoney when he was doing his work in the day up-country. Then you had the Australians at another table, and you had the British at another table, and you had the UN, and then UNICEF [the United Nations Children's Fund] had come in, and you had all the CDC staff. We celebrated John Neatherlin's birthday while he was there and that was one of the things that I felt very passionate about, that we should celebrate things that are important in life while we were there like Thanksgiving. So John had his birthday and we got a cake for him just to have thirty minutes of where we took out and really honored something that is part of our everyday life here in the 01:23:00United States. That stood out for me. And then our drivers who drove our staff around every day that allowed them to get from one place to the next. You come back and you think about--I think about the people there all the time and I just--you know, you wonder how they're doing and you wonder how their families are and you hope their kids are okay. You hope that they're protected and safe, and so when you hear a new case come up, where was it? Whenever I hear somebody behind me say the word Liberia, you just automatically kind of perk up.

Then coming back, especially with the first tour, it was a very intense 01:24:00situation. The cases were still high and you're not allowed to touch anybody, and then when you come back and you haven't seen somebody since you got back and you just give them a great big hug because you've experienced something together with them that is not commonplace and won't be commonplace, I think, in our careers. It's really joyous is what it is, and you just give them a big hug and it's so good to see them. I saw one yesterday, Kim, who was there during my second tour, and it's just always lovely to see people because you were in very difficult and unusual circumstances. I think like the early days of terrorism that that is a bond that doesn't go away throughout people's careers.

Q: Can you tell me about being a person of faith during the trips?

DOPSON: Sure. I'm a Christian, a believer in Jesus Christ, and I have a very strong and grounded faith. I think that when I was there, because there's so many needs there, it was such a struggle for me because it's like, where you could just--where do you turn to help people? Really, it came down to what can you do or say and how can you be a reflection of Jesus Christ with the person that is in front of you, with the words that you use and the kindness that you show to them, just in the concern that you have for people. What is a little 01:26:00thing you can do with each in a day and with every person that comes in front of you. It was really great to have Samaritan's Purse back there. They had gone through a tremendous amount and are doing their own work with building a hospital there now that ELWA-3 has been torn down. They were really on their own in the beginning. They evacuated their staff because--I found out later when I came back to the US, they evacuated their staff--or no, I found out when I was over there, because it was really to the point that it was at the risk of the staff that were there. They were outnumbered with the number of cases versus the number of personnel that they actually have.

Q: Were you able to attend services? You're with the chaplain--

DOPSON: Yes, you could attend services there if you chose to do so. They also had services for the embassy staff on Wednesday twice a week I believe, once or twice a week for the embassy staff, and so I think some of the embassy staff could choose to go to that, because remember, you could not congregate and the church is a congregation so you were at risk if you went to a local church. I think those are the things people don't think about in a situation like Ebola. School is out. That's something we didn't talk about. The kids were out of 01:28:00school, and one of the loveliest things that I used to see--I have pictures of this that I actually show my students. They would have an Ebola school every Wednesday night, so we had staff meetings every day for the first deployment [and we would pass the children on the way to the embassy.] And then the second deployment we went down to a few days a week. We would round the bend and go up to the new embassy and they had all these precious children in front of a teacher, and they would have all the Ebola signs up and they were doing "how to not get Ebola" teachings and trainings, and it was just actually really precious to see. But [regular] school is out for quite a long time, and the children essentially lost a year of school, so there were so many different levels that this impacted in terms of the outbreak. Then getting the cases down to the point where it was safe for people to go back and have their children in public 01:29:00schools, or they have private schools and church schools there.

Q: Now, was it the two deployments? Did you ever go back?

DOPSON: I have not gone back. They have asked me five times, and I would love to go back. I had committed to teach at Georgia State for the fall semester and so that was a commitment that I felt like I needed to keep. It's also an opportunity for me to share with the next generation, this is what a real outbreak is like and these are all the different nuances you have to consider when you go into a career in public health. I feel like the experience also allowed me to transfer the knowledge to them and for them to see real-life 01:30:00experiences and that public health isn't just about one particular specialty. Our communications staff that were working with the media, we had our quarantine staff working with training people at the airport, and then we had our epidemiologists, we had our log staff, and we had our senior leadership. Those are all different areas of focus and you work together as a team to decrease the number of cases for Ebola. That's what I love about public health is you always are learning something and there's a place for so many different specialty areas to work together.

Q: When you look back, what specific challenges that you had really stick out in your memory?

DOPSON: There were challenges just all day long. [laughs] I mean when I arrived, 01:31:00there were no standard operating procedures, and it was a challenge all the way around. There were no standard operating procedures, there were no--we had no copier, we had no fax. Constantly going up to the embassy, making sure our staff--especially the ones when they came up-country, that they had a place to sleep and have a good meal. The hotels were full with Westerners from other agencies. Fortunately, the DART team was next door to us, so we weren't competing with [them for space]. There was one Western grocery store which is apparently a really big deal because I met people that have worked in other countries where you don't have that. And the military, you would often see the military there, too. It was just--everything was a challenge, and it just makes 01:32:00you realize in many ways it's easier in the United States because you have things that you just assume are there, and when you work internationally it's just not the case. You make it work. I figured out a way to make it work and I was very fortunate that I had great leadership both times and then I had a good colleague that we worked really well together and could split work up. When the equipment needed to be loaded and sent back to the United States--you know, all of those things. Worked very collaboratively and collegially together. I would say, you have smoke detectors here, you check to make sure your smoke detector worked in your room. There was no aspect I think that I would say--we were 01:33:00fortunate we had a good hotel, but a lot of things that we make assumptions for here, they just are not there or they haven't been built yet.

Q: Can you tell me about a time when you had to make a creative decision, because you lacked something or--

DOPSON: That was all the time. [laughs]

Q: I'm sure it was all the time.

DOPSON: It was all the time. Especially when we had staff spread out at different locations and I would have six drivers that I was managing, so I was always on the phone. My phone rang nonstop, which was fine because I really enjoyed the work that I was doing, but sometimes you had to figure out how to make something work and that was usually several times throughout the day. I 01:34:00think the other thing that really stands out for me too is a story I haven't told yet.

Especially in the first tour, there were children that would be brought out of villages to be screened at the ETUs because they weren't sure that they had Ebola and they would bring them in. It does get very emotional I think when you're dealing with children in particular and you would hear these stories that--you know, when you go into an ETU, you do not come out with your possessions. They have to take--they have to, they have to take the clothes and all of that stuff. They give them some clothing back, but then they're literally left there with no transport. I had an epidemiologist one morning, a big burly guy from Texas--and this story I don't think I will ever forget. He was clearly 01:35:00very touched about the case he was working on. There were these two little boys that--the villages would often turn people out, like their parents had died. That was a big piece that you had to educate on, what causes Ebola and doesn't. But these two little boys who were five and seven or seven and nine, their parents had died of Ebola, so the village had turned them out. There was this squabble locally and the end result was these two boys ended up sleeping out in the field and dying. Clearly that's very emotional, and it's very emotional when you hear stories of children being left outside the ETU, and often the Westerners would come and we'd try to figure out how--an agency would try to get 01:36:00them back to the village, at least that was what they were trying to do. Sometimes you just have to walk down the hall and you have to have a moment, the way that this epidemiologist was sharing with me, because those things are not easy to hear and they're not easy to see and so sometimes you really just had to step down the hall and you just had to have a moment. And then you went back to work because that's what you were there for and you have to be able to handle these things. I think a lot of the CDC staff, when you're in those 01:37:00situations--he was clearly very compassionate, very concerned about these two boys, and it becomes very personal. That's what it becomes, it becomes very personal. You don't want a child to die of Ebola. When you're there working to make that happen in whatever capacity, whether it's communications or as an epidemiologist, those stories are very emotional and have an impact on you.

Q: When you think about all of--and I know you're in logistics. I don't know to what extent you--actually that's a good question, to what extent you saw or worked with people who had Ebola.

DOPSON: No, so we were not actually supposed to be in that particular role. We did a lot of great training here and then in-country that they teach you, for 01:38:00the epidemiologists that went out and did the case investigations, whether it was in Monrovia--you know, you stayed a certain feet away because you didn't know. Our training for that was very excellent. That wasn't our role there, was to treat. Now the HHS group that would fly in and that was in the ETU next to the airport, that was different, and they were actually quarantined when they got back into the United States for thirty days. But the ETUs were all throughout Monrovia, and then the logistics, actually, we went out because there was a lot of stuff stored. Everything that was coming into the country in terms of tents, they had tents, supplies, food, any of that all went to this one location and it was an old stadium. DART drove us out there because they wanted 01:39:00us to see how everything was stored and what we could use, etcetera, and so that was near an ETU. You were driving by ETUs because there's one road between the airport all the way through Monrovia and up to the embassy and that is it. You were driving by ETUs throughout the day depending on what your route was. And then we had the Chinese, they had come in to build an ETU that was at the stadium where all the material that was brought in--it didn't matter who was bringing it in, it all got stored there. So there was an inventory, so everybody knew what you had.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about coordinating between other governments 01:40:00that were there for the response?

DOPSON: Actually, everybody was really lovely to work with. The Chinese came in and we had a liaison that worked in China that worked mainly with them, but the other countries, it was very collaborative. We would have these meetings that I mentioned twice a week where people from the other agencies, Western agencies and the Ministry, would help, would come and discuss what was going on with particular projects, figure out if they needed to leverage material that another agency had that they could contribute. It was really a good example of the way things should work because it was very collaborative. Really it was just collaborative.

Q: Do you feel like you came away with a different understanding of CDC or 01:41:00public health or global health?

DOPSON: It's always been real interesting to watch people who have worked in bioterrorism and preparedness. Often a lot of my colleagues that I worked with, especially in the early days after 9/11, are now working internationally and two of them are actually based overseas. I think that's kind of a continuum. You don't really see them going to work so much in other areas. I do think there is a link with the preparedness and the international aspect, and I can see myself working internationally someday. It's not a good time in my life right now to be based overseas permanently, but at some point I'm definitely very open to that.

Q: Is there anything else that you'd like to make sure that we have on record?

DOPSON: No, I think that's it.

Q: This has been enormously informative and will I'm sure be a rich resource that people are going to look back on. Thank you so much Dr. Dopson. It's been a pleasure to sit here with you and listen to your experiences.

DOPSON: Thank you for having me.

END