PENA: I woke up.
I saw blood all over the blankets.
And my hands and my feet were bitten by something.
I didn't know what it was.
Then we realized that there had been bats.
DOWELL: We can help countries to pick up new threats,
to confirm them in the laboratory,
to investigate clusters of disease, and ultimately
to treat patients and contain new disease threat
before it spreads around the world.
DANEL: Diseases cross borders,
and what happens in these small countries,
what happens in one country may affect the other countries.
LINDBLADE: And of these new emerging infections,
Zoonotic diseases play a huge role.
And Zoonotic diseases are those that are transmitted
from animals to humans.
JULIAO: Bats are found all over the world,
and they've been associated
with different diseases all over the world,
so what information we find here will give us an idea
of what sort of infections they can harbor
and what is the likelihood
of those infections being transmitted to humans.
MORAN: Right now, right here,
we are trying to get some samples
from the bats, because there's
an outbreak right now -- there's a current outbreak
of rabies in cattle in this area.
We find bats in the net.
We check what kind of species,
because there are some protected species.
We take and put in some small bags,
and then we took all the captured animals
and go to a facility here in the village.
We anesthetize the animals
and take blood samples
and samples from ectoparasites.
LINDBLADE: The reason for having the program here
is to understand more about the kinds
of infections and diseases
that are occurring in Central America,
which helps us to understand and prepare better
in the United States, to counter --
to prevent and to treat -- these important infectious diseases.
VARMA: SARS was really the wake-up call for GDD.
BREIMAN: Where it occurred locally, it was a local problem,
recognized as a local problem,
but over a period of time,
became an international problem.
McFARLAND: U.S. CDC started
an emerging infectious disease program here in China,
largely in response to the 2003 SARS epidemic.
VARMA: Through the work we do with the Chinese government
to build modern surveillance systems,
we're able to detect an outbreak that they never
would have picked up before, because it was occurring
in a large area, over a long period of time.
ZHU: we are making a big impact in that country,
because we are training their workforce
and training their disease detectives.
VARMA: We were specifically focused
on one pathogen called salmonella,
and within just a few months of data that we were analyzing
side by side with our partners in China,
we were able to see that there were
a number of cases with a very specific molecular fingerprint
that were occurring only in infants.
DOWELL: There's no doubt in my mind
that we are better prepared in 2010 for a pandemic
than we were in 2003.
We knew even when people questioned,
"Is central Africa sort of a dark window
with pandemic H1N1, how would we even know if it was there?"
Well, we had respiratory surveillance in place in Kenya.
BREIMAN: We have a very unique project going on in Kibera.
We have a group of what we call community interviewers --
they're basically field workers --
[ Ouma speaking Kenyan language ]
BREIMAN: And they carry personal digital assistants,
you know, PDAs.
These PDAs are programmed
with the questions we're trying to get answers for.
OUMA: Like, we can talk of cholera.
H1N1 was found in the community.
ODENGO: She wanted to know how we are going on,
anyone who has been sick, anyone who has been in hospital.
OUMA: So, in this last one week...
BREIMAN: And this is an area of about 30,000 people,
about 8,000 households.
And they go to every single household every two weeks.
And if someone's very sick, they encourage them
to go to the field clinic.
ODENGO: Like one day, I fell sick of pneumonia.
I couldn't walk. I couldn't do anything.
So my neighbors carried me up to CDC.
BREIMAN: When they go to that clinic,
if they have a condition that we're surveying for,
that we're concerned about -- let's say
it's pneumonia, as an example --
then we collect information about that illness
in the clinic by one of the well-trained clinicians
that we have working there.
Because of market practices, because of air traffic,
it's very possible for a disease
to move from one corner of the Earth
to another within a day.
DOWELL: There's no better way to protect
the American population against new disease threats
than by strengthening our partners
in public health institutions around the world.
LINDBLADE: It's not a profession that you get into for the money.
You really get into it because you
feel like you can make a difference.
MORAN: I really love this job.
I really love go to the field
and catch the animals and find the samples.
VARMA: When we are seen as people that are not political,
in the best interest of the public health
in the United States or somewhere else,
I think that's when we're really at our best.
DOWELL: We've learned that we need to be
prepared for the unexpected,
and the better we understand the background of pathogens
emerging from animal reservoirs, the better prepared
we're going to be to respond to the next surprise.