|
|
||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||
|
Profiles in Public Health
|
||||||||||||
|
Editor's note:
Your degrees are in veterinary medicine - what led you down that path? I see they're from Colorado - did you grow up there and was your family in the ranching or farming business? Veterinary medicine wasn’t a childhood dream, but I always loved animals. Life first in Arizona and then Colorado connected me to ranching life. When academic politics drained my enthusiasm during my PhD social psychology program, I looked for another scientific path. Colorado State University was just up the road, and I knew veterinary medicine would offer endless variety. Did you have a mentor who encouraged you to follow this path in life? When did you first know you wanted to be a DVM? Was your interest predominantly in a large or small animal practice...or were you a researcher at heart? At first, I imagined opening a cat practice so I could move easily for my husband’s government career. CSU encouraged applicants to explore the field broadly, so I completed externships with small and large animal practices, the Denver Zoo, and Dr. John Emerson, the State Public Health Veterinarian. His work captivated me. By my second year, I was assisting Dr. John Reif in a Giardia study. He introduced me to a CDC EIS Officer—and that set my course. Where did you initially work? What brought you to the East Coast? CSU allowed senior students a trimester to explore career options. I split mine between a Manhattan cat practice and CDC’s Birth Defects program, including a field investigation in Boston—quite an adjustment for someone new to big cities. While at CDC, I interviewed for the EIS program and became one of only three veterinarians in the 1983 class. After my EIS assignment at the National Cancer Institute, my husband and I hoped to return west. New Mexico’s State Environmental Epidemiologist position opened, and I spent 12 rewarding years there, later adding the State Public Health Veterinarian role. Through national committee work, I met leaders in veterinary epidemiology, and when Dr. Jack Debbie retired in New York, I seized the chance to continue his work—bringing me to Albany for two decades. How did your transition from DVM to epidemiology professor happen? Teaching runs in my family so it felt natural—my mother taught languages and my father was a school librarian. Both the New Mexico and New York health departments encouraged part-time teaching, and I supplemented my training with summer epidemiology institutes. The University at Albany School of Public Health grew out of NYSDOH, and I was fortunate to be involved in its academic programs, eventually becoming a Full Professor. It seems like topics such as Avian Flu are showing up more often - what do you see as the future for veterinary epidemiologists? Is the demand increasing for this career segment? Zoonotic disease risks are rising as the world changes. Avian flu surveillance remains essential, but COVID reminded us that many pathogens can cause global disruption. Most potential bioterrorism agents and emerging diseases are zoonotic. Veterinary epidemiologists will remain vital members of One Health teams, not only for animal-related health outcomes. Do veterinary epidemiologists primarily work with zoonotic diseases? Not exclusively. Veterinary epidemiologists are trained across species and equipped with analytical tools that apply to a wide range of health challenges—animal, human, and environmental. Our skill set is less about species and more about understanding patterns, risks, and causes of disease wherever they emerge. One example from my own career was helping lead the first investigation that linked L-tryptophan supplements to a newly recognized eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome, which led to a rapid FDA recall. Is AI a tool that has been useful to you in your work? If so, how? Do you think that AI will impact the need - especially for entry level epidemiologists? AI is both helpful and concerning. I worry when students rely on it so heavily that they don’t develop scientific reasoning or communication skills. As a novelist, I’m competing with a flood of AI-generated fiction. Yet computer-based tools have long been part of scientific work. I ground all my story science in peer-reviewed Pub Med articles, but newer AI tools with citations now streamline some of the background research I once did through endless Google searches. I don’t believe that AI can replace the complex skills of epidemiologists, or creative writers who have original visions. What do you feel is the best advice you give your students as they look at their future careers? Embrace every opportunity to learn and contribute to public health. With shrinking budgets, curiosity and flexibility matter more than ever. Many of my students already work in health-related fields, and my zoonoses and climate change course helps broaden their skills and perspectives. How have the federal cutbacks impacted your specific area of work? Talented people are losing jobs, and preventable illnesses and deaths are rising. It’s demoralizing for those who remain, who must uphold science-based work amid growing science denial. One goal of my novels is to spotlight public health, much as The West Wing did for government service. My series hasn’t reached 2025 yet, but I’m already weaving in references to agencies like USAID so readers understand the value of what’s being lost. Do you feel the public understands the value of veterinary epidemiology to the world? If not, what do you think can be done to educate them? COVID helped people learn what epidemiology is, but veterinary epidemiologists remain largely invisible, even within medicine. When people hear I’m a veterinarian, they assume clinical practice. We need broader adoption of One Health and more recognition of veterinary epidemiologists’ contributions. I’m encouraged by the number of public health veterinarians now serving as State Epidemiologists. In addition to your teaching, you are well known as the author of a series of epidemiology based thrillers. What led you to that endeavor? I’ve always been an avid reader—growing up, I finished a book every night. I’d imagined an alphabetical zoonotic mystery series for years, but work and parenting left no time. Retirement from full-time public health finally gave me the space to explore creative outlets like photography, painting, and writing. What kind of reader feedback do you get about these books? I love hearing that readers discover a new world through my books or appreciate the clarity of the science. Representing the breadth of zoonotic public health in fiction is challenging, so I focus on a few characters from key One Health professions while hinting at the larger teams behind real investigations. With 26 planned books, I have room to introduce the contributions of many agencies. I’d like to hear from more public health professionals so I can appropriately represent their work. In addition to writing books you've found time to start writing on Substack? What audience are you targeting there and what do you hope to accomplish with these essays? I’m new to Substack. My email newsletter reaches over a thousand readers, but it doesn’t allow for discussion or long-term access. A friend’s success on Substack inspired me to try it. Sometimes I share overlapping content, but Substack offers more interaction and longevity. Now I just need to connect with more readers there. [Note: A sample from the Substack articles follows below] I hesitate to ask, but in addition to all the things you're doing related to epidemiology, do you find any time for fun and, if so, what things do you enjoy? Writing my microbial mysteries is great fun, but I enjoy plenty beyond that. I teach zoonoses and climate change at the University of Vermont and a sex-education course through my Unitarian/Universalist community. I’m active in book clubs and author groups, lead creative-writing workshops, and design my own book covers. I also love photography, working out, walking or biking along Lake Champlain, and traveling with my family. ■ Epidemiology As A Medical Thriller Author: Millicent Eidson, DVM NOTE: This article was originally published on December 29, 2025 on Substack. Years ago when someone heard that I was a veterinary epidemiologist, this was their frequent question: “Is that like a skin doctor?” The term ‘epidemiologist’ is more familiar to the general public since COVID. If anything, it carries a bad connotation: “Were you one of those shutting down schools?” Veterinarians in Public Health? There was also confusion about my role as a veterinarian in public health. Shouldn’t I be in a clinic caring for animals? But they were fascinated when I explained that veterinarians, like physicians, can work in public service as well as clinical practice. Those vets like me who were accepted into CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program had a jump on our physician colleagues because we were required to have a master’s degree in a public health-related field in addition to our medical degree. I found my two years with CDC, 12 years with the New Mexico Department of Health, and 20 years with the New York Department of Health tremendously rewarding. In each state health department, I was also supported in my ties with academia. My mother was a language teacher and my father an elementary school librarian. I guess teaching and books must be in my blood. Upon my retirement, the University of Vermont welcomed me as a part-time faculty member, teaching about zoonoses and climate change. In my free time, I began to explore my creative side, long postponed by the demands of a public health career. First, photography and painting. Then I discovered that as a senior citizen, I could audit classes at our local colleges for free. Epidemiologists as Creative Writers Scientific writing was old hat for me. I always enjoyed and valued getting my outbreak investigations and other epidemiological studies into peer-reviewed journals. From my point of view, every study was an opportunity to learn and share lessons for risk reduction. But translating that science for the general public through creative writing was a new challenge. My first creative writing class required writing a short story in just a month. I figured I’d better make it about something I already knew. For my teaching, I had a full-semester exercise about a bioterrorism-related plague outbreak, rolling out new information each week for the students to discuss. Plague was an area of expertise because New Mexico typically has the most cases in the US. The creative writing instructor complimented my short story but told me I had crammed too much information into that format—perhaps a novel would be better. That very day, I sat down to list zoonotic diseases from A to Z and began to craft my first alphabetical zoonotic thriller, “Anthracis: A Microbial Mystery” (https://books2read.com/millicenteidson/). Since then, I’ve published novels about Borrelia, Corona, Dengue, and Ebola, plus a collection of short stories. My sixth novel about Fasciola hepatica, the liver fluke, should be out by summer, 2026. I even won a couple of awards for a play and a short story! Connecting with people about zoonotic diseases has been fun and fulfilling. I get to chat with them in person at various book events and over Zoom through creative writing workshops. I’m in a unique position to share the real-world excitement and terror of these diseases. Entertainment, education, and enlightenment—my stated goals on my website https://drmayamaguire.com/. Medical Thrillers The medical thriller is a popular genre—think Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, and Tess Gerritsen. But these stories are typically centered in human hospitals with forensic pathologists as protagonists. They’re often an offshoot to a murder mystery, in which the pathologist partners with law enforcement to solve the crime. My goal is to provide readers something different: ♦ A veterinary epidemiologist as the protagonist ♦ A focus on zoonotic diseases, those transmitted (not necessarily directly) between humans and other animals ♦ Translation of complex statistical analyses and projections about the impact of climate change ♦ An emphasis on the fieldwork required to manage One Health threats ♦ No fictional disease organisms—all information is based on real disease challenges and prevention/control options Often, authors enhance the creative thrill by extrapolating from current disease threats—a virus mutates to threaten the whole world. We all experienced that with COVID, but I specifically want to provide a window into public health workers (not just veterinarians) and their everyday challenges, balancing multiple real threats, large and small. In the MayaVerse, named after my principal character Maya Maguire, every clinical sign is from a respected source or peer-reviewed journal. Characters use investigative and control methods based on what was known at the time of the story. Like the TV series The West Wing, I want to provide a behind-the-curtain peek into real-world zoonotic threats. Fiction as a Public Health Communication Option COVID revealed the challenges of public health communication. Everyone’s working hard on improving our options. Nonfiction book-length compilations of outbreak investigations are one way to share our public health world. But novels and short stories are uniquely designed to engage readers through compelling characters, vivid settings, and exciting plots. Fiction requires a different style of writing—emphasizing emotion—which can feel awkward for those us steeped in science. But I’ve treasured using my medical thrillers to connect with readers who otherwise would view epidemiology through a more distant lens.
Because communication
is a major goal of my medical thrillers, I’d love to hear your
thoughts here. You may also connect through my email,
|
||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||
