CDC Chief Faces Our Fears of Flu With a Soothing Bedside Manner

Tall and camera-ready, Richard E. Besser resembles someone who is not a doctor but plays one on television. Except that he is a doctor who right now must also play one, while some of us are washing our hands 20 times a day to ward off the new incarnation of swine flu.

Besser is acting director of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Such aplomb: He is a scientist who has mastered the healer's delicate art of simultaneously projecting deep concern and profound calm, telling national audiences to worry but not to worry.

Is he worried? What does he think is going to happen?

"Outbreaks don't follow the plan we lay out for them," Besser says in a phone interview.

In other words, he knows what he doesn't know. And that's reassuring, somehow. Maybe it's a tone-of-voice thing.

He has been bringing his well-groomed, unflappable bedside manner to the morning network shows and the evening cable shows. News briefings are sandwiched at midday. Meanwhile he monitors the course of the disease, consults with state and federal officials, plans for vaccine development and calibrates the CDC's response -- which he always characterizes as "very aggressive" and "bold."

In these television encounters, the news anchors inevitably approximate the role of the anxious parent, while Besser plays the reassuring -- but not too reassuring -- family doctor who soothes without sugarcoating. He is 49 -- old enough to be a little paternal (he's married with two sons) and young enough to adapt to a crisis so unpredictable that it makes a hurricane look like a church service.

"The things we learned when we were little -- covering a cough, frequent hand-washing -- if people do these things it will decrease the spread," he says.

"Is it an emergency or not?" Diane Sawyer persists, her voice rising edgily, furrowing her brow on ABC.

"I want people to understand we are concerned," Besser says with great empathy. "We'll tell you what we know when we know it, and we're being very aggressive at trying to understand and control this outbreak. . . . People need to be ready for the idea that we could see more severe cases in this country, and possibly deaths."

Besser has been in the hot seat at the center of one disaster or another going all the way back to his "disease detective" days at the CDC in the early 1990s, when he tracked apple cider laden with E. coli that was making people sick around Boston. One word describes what his job requires him to be: ready.

In 2005, on the morning he started his last job -- the CDC's head of emergency response -- Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana.