Transfer of Health Official Put on Hold : Medicine: Removal of county’s outspoken head of disease control will be reviewed. Dr. Shirley Fannin says she is being made a scapegoat for the department’s problems.

County health officials agreed Tuesday to review the removal of Dr. Shirley Fannin from her longtime post as the director of Los Angeles County’s disease control programs.

The outspoken Fannin, who directed public health fights against sexually communicable diseases, measles and tuberculosis, received notice from top department officials Friday that she was being transferred. News of the move did not reach the health community until Tuesday.

In the face of a strong protest by Fannin, County Health Director Robert Gates has put the transfer on hold, officials said late Tuesday. But Fannin said she believes that action is just a formality.

In an interview with The Times, Fannin said she felt she was being disciplined for speaking out against management of the Department of Health Services, where she has been director of communicable disease control for 18 years.

“I was notified that I would be rotated to (County-USC Medical Center) into what sounds to me like a nonexistent job,” said Fannin, who said she plans to fight the transfer through the county’s Civil Service appeals system. “There is no job, nor is there a staff.”

Fannin said she thought she was being made a scapegoat for some of the department’s problems, in particular the embarrassing return of $1.1 million in unused federal money for tuberculosis programs.

Fannin was the most prominent name on a list of county physicians and public health officials who sent a letter to Dr. Caswell A. Evans Jr., the director of public health programs and services, about lack of communication and clear priorities in the department.

The letter, among other things, declared that “serious barriers exist to spending funds . . . such as grants from the Centers for Disease Control and the state of California.”

The physicians and health officials also said, “We are concerned that the ability to perform disease control duties and plan for the health of our communities has eroded to serious extent.”

The return of the federal tuberculosis money, at a time when the county is hard-pressed for money and tuberculosis poses a growing public health threat, created such an uproar that top Health Department officials formed a special committee of outside consultants to look at the problem.

Dr. James Chin, a professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley and a member of the committee, said Tuesday that he did not think the panel would find fault with Fannin’s operations.

“There was no fault, from my perspective, in Shirley’s unit,” Chin said. “I think it was from Shirley’s unit on up.”

Critics both in and outside the Department of Health Services said Fannin’s transfer continues what they believe is a pattern by department officials of blaming underlings for wider problems.

Lynn Kersey, director of the Children’s Advocacy Institute, said Fannin is highly regarded in public health circles for her efforts during the 1990 measles epidemic that claimed more than 40 lives in Southern California.

“She is a very highly valued public health official,” Kersey said. “ . . . People in the health community thought someone’s head had to roll because of all the problems, but we are very upset that it had to be Shirley Fannin’s.”

Also part of the same transfer is Dr. Ellen Alkon, Fannin’s supervisor and, until Friday, medical director of the division of public health programs and services.

Fannin, according to an internal department memo, is being transferred outside the division to a consulting job at the County-USC Medical Center. Dr. Jessie L. Sherrod, an epidemiologist at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, was chosen as her replacement.