Dr. Robert Tauxe, M.D., Former Director of the CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases

While building a lifelong career as a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Robert Tauxe, M.D., has been at the forefront of hundreds of foodborne illness and disease outbreaks. He’s responded to the 2010 cholera epidemic in Haiti and the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. In 2021, he served as a deputy incident manager in the COVID-19 response.

Tauxe, who retired as director of the CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases in June, received his bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from Yale University and went on to pursue his medical degree at Vanderbilt Medical School, as well as a master’s in public health from Yale.

While in training for his internal medicine degree, he interviewed at the CDC and was matched with what was then the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, a program he would be a part of for more than 40 years.

“The CDC had just identified E. coli O157 as a problem, and they were exploring how to use some of the new techniques back then of molecular subtyping to help make investigations more successful,” Tauxe said.

Tauxe and his team would go out into the field to investigate outbreaks, determine the source and clarify how contamination occurred.

“It was clear that it requires a lot of collaboration to understand outbreaks,” Tauxe said, “collaboration between scientists, and also collaboration between state health department officials and federal agencies like FDA and USDA.”

Tauxe has authored or co-authored more than 314 scientific journal articles, letters and book chapters. In retirement, he plans on writing more literature to continue educating the next generation of scientists and brushing up on his musical hobby of performing in an Indonesian orchestra.

Tauxe shared his views on human and scientific behaviors around the world, as well as collaborating with public health systems, food safety experts and other federal agencies to stay ahead of the curve.

We live in a world of change, and there are changes in human behavior, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. Much of our prevention in this field lies in finding and fostering those changes that help people protect themselves. There are also microbes that are changing. The bacteria and other microbes are evolving, animal populations are in flux, and climate is bringing about new challenges. We can always count on fresh challenges, because Mother Nature bats last.

When we share what we learn and collaborate with colleagues and partners around the country and world, we can find solutions. Pathogens can easily cross borders, but solutions can also easily cross borders. By sharing what we know with partners throughout public health systems and in the food safety industry around the world, we can find solutions to problems and hopefully control them.

The number of ways that new challenges arise has been really something. Salmonella and other bacteria are becoming more resistant to antibiotics, and that makes them harder for doctors to treat. It’s linked to the use of antibiotics in agriculture that can affect human health, and it’s been a major life work.

Working in public health with the food safety industry, one reward has been building better and stronger surveillance systems. We use advanced molecular subtyping technology systems to find outbreaks that are very hard to detect because there were just a few cases in each state which spread all over the country, and now we can find them with these systems.

I came into a small but very active group who had a real heritage of leadership. We looked for the people to train who were going to be asking questions and were good investigators. I think I learned a lot about leadership from my own mentors. As we began collaborating and setting up links around the world, I had the opportunity to spend time with some terrific leaders around the world at the World Health Organization and the European CDC.

Food safety means being prepared for hazards that can come along that may be new and different. We may have challenges that we really haven’t anticipated but can use our methods to tackle and understand better.

Every time there’s a challenge, there is something to learn from it. I encourage everyone to look for the lesson in every emergency that arises.