Last Wednesday was one of those "pinch me" days ... a day of opportunity only available in Washington. After the weekly Harkin constituent breakfast (where I met the BEST 90-year-old lady in DC for the first time who was being given an award for her hundreds of hours of community volunteer work!), I attended a fairly charged Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Subcommittee meeting chaired by the Senator himself on the Andrew Speaker TB case. The first panel featured testimony from Dr. Julie Gerberding, the CDC director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIAID, and a top-ranking official overseeing Customs and Border Control. AMAZING ... Harkin spent a great deal of time trying to establish the timeline for how events took place: when the patient learned he had MDR/XDR TB, was he or was he not given travel restrictions, when he left the country for his wedding, and how he managed to get through the Canadian border. And guess who I heard on the second panel?! None other than the patient himself - live via phone from his isolation hospital room in Denver. Unbelievable ... talk about a perfect 'swiss cheese,' he said-she said case. I can guarantee that this will be the subject of many public health management courses in the years to come!
Right after work last Wednesday, I jetted downtown to an 8,000-strong, $20/person Hillary Clinton fundraiser ... complete with Madeleine Albright, "Babyface" Edmonds, and Billie Jean King. I got a chuckle watching mostly men grab the "Women for Hillary" signs and was happy to see that many folks turned this in to a family event. I'm not necessarily a big fan of the political hoorah, if you will, but I was very impressed with her speech. She's clearly an intelligent, articulate, and strong candidate. It will be an interesting few upcoming months!
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