In 1979, Ford moved to Atlanta and took a position at the
Centers for Disease Control in the Parasitic Diseases Division. Doctors needing one of the medicines would contact Ford, who would get clearance from a CDC physician and arrange for the drug's delivery. Pneumocystis pneumonia is caused by a yeast-like
fungus named
Pneumocystis jirovecii. (At the time,
Pneumocystis jirovecii was known as Pneumocystis carinii, and the resulting disease was commonly called
Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, abbreviated as PCP.
Pneumocystis carinii was also believed at the time to be a parasite rather than a fungus.) In the
United States, pneumocystis pneumonia was very rare; as of a 1967 survey, there had only ever been 107 total recorded cases nationwide, all of them in
immunosuppressed patients. But in February 1981, physician requests for pentamidine began to spike — and, unusually, the requests were for young male patients whose immune systems had no known reason to be suppressed. Ford handled nine such requests in a three-month period for young men in
New York and
California. One New York doctor requested pentamidine for five different patients during the first three weeks of April alone. "I figured he should go back to medical school if he couldn't find a simple
neoplasm," Ford told journalist
Randy Shilts later. "People just didn't need this drug unless there was an underlying diagnosis of immunosuppression." That same physician also began requesting repeat doses of pentamidine for his patients. This was unprecedented, because the drug had previously always been effective with just a single dose. Soon after, a different New York doctor mentioned to Ford that five young gay men in the city had been diagnosed with
Kaposi's sarcoma, a disease previously associated with elderly men in the
Mediterranean,
Eastern Europe, and
Middle East. Seeing a pattern, Ford took the cases to her boss, deputy director of parasitic disease Dennis Juranek, who asked her to write up her findings in a memo. She did so on April 28, 1981. A group of CDC epidemiologists began working on the unknown epidemic. An article titled "
Pneumocystis pneumonia — Los Angeles" highlighted five cases in the June 5, 1981, issue of the
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC's newsletter on new
public health information. This was the first reference to AIDS in the medical literature. A July 3 article, titled "Kaposi's Sarcoma and
Pneumocystis Pneumonia Among Homosexual Men — New York City and California," raised the number of case reports to 39 patients; another article on August 28 increased the number of known cases to 108. Ford was able to detect the unusual clusters despite not being a physician or scientist. "Although she had no formal training in medical science," two CDC colleagues wrote in an obituary, "she had a prepared mind and thought like an
epidemiologist." At some point, later in the 1980s, a CDC staffer taped a paper-napkin sign to the door of Ford's office, which was Room 161 in CDC Building 6. It read: "In this room in the spring of 1981, the epidemic of what later became known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome was discovered." ==Later life==