An epidemic intelligence officer assigned to the Connecticut state health department, David R. Snydman contacted Allen Steere who was studying rheumatology at Yale University, after he had performed a preliminary investigation and thought that there was some symptom complex worth investigating. He knew Allen Steere since they were together in Atlanta the year before at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), when both were in the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a CDC program set up in the 1950s to track epidemics worldwide.