Beating Back the Devil
Maryn McKenna is an award-winning science and medical writer and the author of Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Epidemic Intelligence Service's Disease Detectives (named one of the top 10 science books of 2004 by Amazon). She currently works as a contributing writer for the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and as a media fellow for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. She graduated from Georgetown University and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, as well as Harvard Medical School. She currently resides in Minneapolis.
They are the disease detective corps of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal agency responsible for tracking and preventing disease outbreaks and bioterrorist attacks around the world. They are formally known as the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS)—a group founded more than fifty years ago out of fear that the Korean War would result in the use of biological weapons—and, like traditional intelligence operatives, they work largely in anonymity. They are not household names, but they were among the first to deal with outbreaks of hantavirus, Ebola, and AIDS over the years. Every day, they work to protect us by tracking down deadly threats that we overlook until they dominate the news, such as West Nile virus, anthrax, and SARS.
Maryn McKenna, the only journalist ever granted full access to the EIS in its fifty-three-year history, follows the first class of disease detectives to arrive at the CDC after September 11, the first to confront not only naturally occurring outbreaks but also the man-made threat of bioterrorism. They are talented researchers, many of whom have young families, who trade two years of low pay and extremely long hours for the chance to be part of the group on the frontlines, in the yellow suits and masks, that has helped eradicate smallpox, push back polio, and solve the first major outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease, toxic shock syndrome, and E. coli O157, and works to combat every new disease before it becomes an epidemic.
Beating Back the Devil is an urgent, exhilarating, and compelling book that takes you inside the world of these medical detectives who are trying to stop the next epidemic—before the epidemics stop us. You thought you knew what an infectious epidemiologist did after reading The Hot Zone. McKenna's meticulous research gives you an inside look at how CDC outbreak investigators dealt with Ebola, SARS, and other diseases.
Author: Maryn McKenna
Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439123101
Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 54 reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #941,629 in Books
#439 in Epidemiology (Books)
#626 in Communicable Diseases (Books)
#1,157 in History of Medicine (Books)
