CHAMBLEE - When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recruited Doctor Julie Gerberding four years ago to lead its fight against hospital infections, she took the job only on one condition. <br>
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She would only come on board, she told government health officials, if they could guarantee new labs for her colleagues -- facilities suitable for the critical work they were doing. <br>
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Now Gerberding is in charge of the CDC -- an agency whose profile is higher than it's been since the height of the AIDS panic. But those scientists still work in buildings that are literally falling apart, with many colleagues toiling in windowless cubes, with sewer pipes running overhead. <br>
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Earlier this month the CDC dedicated two new labs at its campus in suburban Atlanta -- sparkling glass-and-steel structures to house scientists working on parasitic diseases and toxins like lead and pesticide. <br>
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But a handful of those scientists will be left behind in the facilities those labs are meant to replace shabby wood-frame buildings that resemble the trailers that overcrowded high schools use as classrooms. <br>
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And those labs remain more the rule than the exception at the CDC. <br>
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The two buildings that opened July 19 are the most visible pieces yet of CDC's plan for rebuilding and renovating. It is an ambitious ten-year, one billion dollars project that is only in its second year.
