Hi, Atlanta!

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has deep roots in Atlanta and plays an important role in making the city a public health center. Have you ever wondered why the CDC is here, when most federal agencies are in Washington?

As with many things in Atlanta, the answer involves Coca-Cola — and mosquitoes. Coca-Cola chairman Robert W. Woodruff purchased land in Baker County for quail hunting about 100 years ago.

Malaria plagued the South in a way that’s hard for us to imagine now. One early CDC administrator said a lumber company in north Florida needed a 700-person workforce to ensure 300 were healthy enough to work during malaria season. Half the workforce was ill at any one time, and everyone had to plan for malaria season. “This was expected as a way of life,” the administrator said, according to an account in the journal Southern Spaces. It was a health and economic burden in Georgia.

Woodruff worked with Emory University to set up treatment centers and a field station at Ichauway Plantation in 1939. The state’s malariologist (yes, that used to be a job), Dr. Justin Andrews, helped run it.

During World War II, malaria became a military concern, as troops traveling overseas fell ill. The federal government established the Malaria Control in War Areas program in Atlanta, run by Andrews. That morphed into the Communicable Disease Center in 1946. According to one account, a phone call from Woodruff to his hunting buddy President Dwight Eisenhower may have helped garner the federal funds to build the CDC’s first headquarters on 15 acres of land near Emory University, purchased for just $10.

Flash forward seven decades, and the CDC has two sprawling campuses,

the original one near Emory and another in Chamblee. But today’s federal government is seeking to shrink the agency through funding cuts and layoffs.

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