Public Health Service

Comstock joined the U.S. Public Health Service in 1942 and served as a captain for 21 years. In this role, he ran the first trials of the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis in Georgia and Alabama (1947–1951), the findings of which were crucial to the decision not to implement this vaccine in the United States.^[1] It was also one of the first, if not the first, use of a cluster-randomized study design.

Public health education

He received a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan School of Public Health (1951) and Doctorate of Public Health in Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins (1956). He subsequently joined the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and taught there for more than 50 years.^[3]

Tuberculosis treatment research

In 1957, he led research in Bethel, Alaska, estimating the high burden of tuberculosis and demonstrating the drug isoniazid's effectiveness in preventing the disease.^[1]

Community-based research

In 1962, Comstock founded the Johns Hopkins Training Center for Public Health Research and Prevention in Hagerstown, Maryland. During this time, together with Abraham Lilienfeld, he came up with the pioneering idea of using biologic samples in cohort studies. For the next 42 years, Comstock oversaw community-based research studies on numerous diseases including cancer and heart disease, including the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS), the Campaign Against Cancer and Stroke (CLUE I), the Campaign Against Cancer and Heart Disease (CLUE II), and the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study. He also may have conducted, the first case-cohort study reported in the literature, four decades ago, dealing with the relationships of maternal smoking to risks of neonatal and post-neonatal death.

American Journal of Epidemiology

Comstock also served as editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Epidemiology (AJE) from 1979 to 1988. He was subsequently the editor-in-chief, emeritus, from 1991 to 2007.^[3] Volume 167, issue 7 of AJE was dedicated entirely to Comstock following his death.^[4]

Research themes

In his 2006 curriculum vitae,^[3] Comstock summarized his research as follows:

Although I seem to be generally associated with tuberculosis, a review of my publications will show that my research interests have been very broad. The common thread through most of these studies has been that they are based on local communities— Muscogee county, GA; Bethel area of Alaska; and Washington County, Maryland. During the past 30 years, a major part of my research has dealt with the relationships of serum or plasma concentrations of micronutrients, hormones, and viral antibodies to the subsequent development of cancer. More recently, the interactions of gene and environmental characteristics have been a major focus. I have also been concerned with some of the elementary (but ignored) problems of long-term storage of biologic specimens— temperature variation within freezers, changes on concentrations of analytes with prolonged storage, and the degree of agreement of analyte concentrations in specimens from the same individual separated by years of storage. Another major portion of my research has been collaboration in studies of cardiovascular outcomes associated with serologic and clinical characteristics determined years earlier. Specifically, this has involved linkage of records from the Washington County portions of ARIC (Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities) and CHS (Cardiovascular Health Study) with records from our two big blood collection projects, CLUE I and CLUE II . The combination is a unique resource.