Joseph Walter Mountin

Joseph Walter Mountin MD (October 13, 1891 – April 26, 1952) was an American physician and career United States Public Health Service (USPHS) officer who was the founder of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.

[3] He was assigned to manage safe and healthy zones surrounding temporary military camps constructed during World War I in Louisville, Kentucky; Des Moines, Iowa; and Waco, Texas.

[7] In July 1918, he was commissioned as an assistant surgeon and began training in quarantine duty, marine hospital service, and health administration.

In 1931, Mountin transferred to Washington to direct the new USPHS Office of Studies of Public Health Methods in the Division of Scientific Research.

[9] He led studies and prepared recommendations on the relation of housing to health; on health-promoting possibilities for accident prevention, heart disease, and cancer.

[14] The law supplied hospitals, nursing homes, and other health facilities with grants and loans for construction and modernization in exchange for agreement to deliver care for a reasonable number of patients unable to pay.

[18][19] Its chief job was malaria control and prevention around military bases and industrial complexes crucial to the war effort.

Mountin recognized the opportunity MCWA offered for protecting the health and safety of the nation during peacetime as an agency that could assist states with laboratory and epidemiologic investigations and training.

[22] Mountin's vision was for a center of technical competence for research and training that could quickly and efficiently provide states services in specific operational fields.

[26] While there was progress in the prevention and control of malaria, as well as typhus and yellow fever, Mountin reminded staff CDC was responsible for all communicable diseases.

[28] Emory University, founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church, gifted 15 acres of land adjacent to its campus on Clifton Road in Atlanta in 1947 to CDC for its headquarters for a token payment of $10.

Woodruff held a long interest in malaria because the disease was widespread on his 36,000-acre hunting preserve in southeastern Georgia and it affected the health of the area's tenant farmers and their families.

[31] At the time CDC was created, Mountin was assigned the task of spokesman for the USPHS on the idea of a national health program.

In his testimony, Mountin pointed out that the lowest income group, which had the greatest frequency and longest duration of illnesses, received the smallest amount of medical services.

In 1949, he was adviser on health and welfare to the Economic Mission to Colombia, South America that was organized by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

[39] In honor of its founder, CDC established the Annual Joseph W. Mountin Lecture in 1980 to address important contemporary public health issues.