"I don’t quite understand the animosity toward the Commissioned Corps,” said Jim Currie, executive director of the Commissioned Officers Association of the U.S. Public Health Service. “These folks are doing day jobs” — at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health and elsewhere within the government — “and when they’re needed, they go and deploy and work their butts off for 12 to 14 hours a day.” In other public health news: genealogical sleuthing; cancer patients who defy the odds; bird flu research, mid-life fitness benefits, cancer care for older patients and circadian lighting.