Spring 2001 Issue
Dedicated to Improving the Health of the Nation
Steve Schroeder makes his mark as a champion of public health
1966 was a tumultuous year. The United States was rapidly moving troops into Vietnam as anti-war sentiment escalated, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s freedom movement was in full swing. But for Steven A. Schroeder, M.D., EIS ‘66, the year was pivotal for a different reason. This was the year Schroeder began his training with CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) - an experience that would shape the course of his career.
His first EIS field assignment was a staphylococcal food-poisoning outbreak so severe that “in a twist on the old song, the ‘Streets of Laredo’ were full of vomit,” he says. That was Schroeder’s initiation to the front lines of public health. For the next two years of EIS, Schroeder gathered the necessary scientific data to help encourage industry to clean up its act and eliminate the transmission of food- and water-borne illnesses. Today, Schroeder continues to champion critical public health issues in his work at The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest health philanthropy.
Steve Schroeder always knew he wanted a career in public health. From early on, his parents instilled in him a strong desire to help others less fortunate. During his fourth year at Harvard Medical School, he spent three months at a public health clinic in Brazil and returned home with a desire to impact public health in his own country. His commitment was strengthened further during his internship and first year of residency at an under-funded, inner-city hospital in Boston.
Recognizing that he needed more experience in epidemiology and surveillance and that he was likely to be drafted to serve in Vietnam, Schroeder followed in the footsteps of his friend and former classmate Albert R. Martin, M.D., EIS ‘65, and applied for a position with the EIS. “I was delighted when I received a telegram from CDC offering me the position,” he says.
As an EIS officer and chief of CDC’s Salmonellosis Unit, he responded to confirmed outbreaks of salmonella, tracked epidemics caused by different salmonella serotypes (there were then more than 1,700), determined increases in incidences, looked for antibiotic-resistant strains, prepared monthly surveillance reports, lectured, and wrote journal articles and book chapters. “My experience with the EIS was fun - a lasting gift,” he says.
While participating in the program, Schroeder traveled to a Washington, D.C., conference center where many government officials had become sick from E. coli in drinking water. There he documented one of the first water-borne outbreaks of gastroenteritis from E. coli. Then he went to Peru to investigate a salmonellosis outbreak in a hospital. Its source, he determined, was carmine dye used to color patients’ stools red for imaging. Ironically, the dye was used for patients with gastrointestinal problems.
Schroeder says his EIS experience provided him with the tools and training to prepare him for a variety of positions over the course of a three decade-long career. As founding medical director of George Washington University’s health maintenance organization in the early ’70s, Schroeder applied epidemiological approaches to practice patterns. He studied health care delivery patterns and learned that “if you use money more wisely, then you expand the number of people you can cover and let your money go further,” he says.
He also applied his EIS background and training at the University of California San Francisco, where he established a new general internal medicine division. Generalists had been in private practice for many years, he says, but academia concerned itself more with training physicians in subspecialty medicine. He studied the epidemiology of high-cost medicine and wrote definitive position papers that motivated academia to become more focused on preparing physicians to address the health concerns of the general public.
Today, Schroeder is president and CEO of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). With assets of over $8 billion, the foundation has a three-fold mission: to ensure all Americans have access to basic health care, to improve care and support for individuals with chronic disease, and to promote health and prevent disease by reducing the harm caused by substance abuse. During his 11-year tenure at RWJF, Schroeder has developed new programs to improve care at the end of life, expand health insurance coverage for children, promote volunteer coalitions for homebound individuals, influence medicine to include more generalists, and prevent substance abuse in youth, especially tobacco use.
In addition to his anti-tobacco work at RWJF, Schroeder also serves on the board of the American Legacy Foundation - a national, independent, public health foundation committed to decreasing the use of tobacco by Americans. Through these activities, he attacks the tobacco problem with much the same passion as in his previous crusades - “I want to try to improve health and health care in this country and leave it a better place than it was before,” he says.
- Lee Jenkins