Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service
Written by Maryn McKenna
Narrated by Ellen Archer
4/5
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About this audiobook
They always keep a bag packed. They seldom have more than twenty-four hours' notice before they are dispatched. The phone calls that tell them to head to the airport, sometimes in the middle of the night, may give them no more information than the country they are traveling to and the epidemic they will tackle when they get there.
The universal human instinct is to run from an outbreak of disease. These doctors run toward it.
They are the disease detective corps of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal agency that tracks and tries to prevent disease outbreaks and bioterrorist attacks around the world. They are formally called the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) - a group founded more than fifty years ago out of fear that the Korean War might bring the use of biological weapons - and, like intelligence operatives in the traditional sense, they perform their work largely in anonymity. They are not household names, but over the years they were first to confront the outbreaks that became known as hantavirus, Ebola virus, and AIDS. Now they hunt down the deadly threats that dominate our headlines: West Nile virus, anthrax, and SARS.
In this riveting narrative, Maryn McKenna - the only journalist ever given full access to the EIS in its fifty-three-year history - follows the first class of disease detectives to come to the CDC after September 11, the first to confront not just naturally occurring outbreaks but the man-made threat of bioterrorism. They are talented researchers - many with young families - who trade two years of low pay and extremely long hours for the chance to be part of the group that has helped eradicate smallpox, push back polio, and solve the first major outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease, toxic shock syndrome, and E. coli O157.
Urgent, exhilarating, and compelling, Beating Back the Devil goes with the EIS as they try to stop epidemics - before the epidemics stop us.
Maryn McKenna
Maryn McKenna is an award-winning science and medical writer and author of Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (named one of the top 10 science books of 2004 by Amazon). She currently works as a contributing writer for the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and is a media fellow at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and has also studied at Harvard Medical School. She lives in Minneapolis.
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Reviews for Beating Back the Devil
52 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book tells you everything you ever wanted to know about joining and working for the EIS, which is like the CIA but with biohazards and diseases. The gore is kept to a minimum and the workings of government are kept to a maximum, which means it can get dull at times. The people outlined in this book are described well, but not well enough that I care to follow their particular career path. I was more interested in how the outbreaks were contained, what the particular epidemic did, etc.
I did learn a lot of interesting stats about listeria and SARS. I may never eat cold cuts again. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a book about the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the "disease detective corps" of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For three weeks, Ph.D.s, nurses, doctors, veterinarians, dentists, and even lawyers are trained in epidemiology and public health. They are put through a rigorous class schedule, frightening simulations, and even yanked out of classes to deal with disease outbreaks. Once they are fully trained, they spend two years working where-ever they are needed. Their work is multi-pronged: they go door-to-door, interviewing every contact of an infected person; they use molecular biology to pin down which cases of a disease are involved in an outbreak; they reassure the public. Sometimes they are assigned to work in a state, coordinating and investigating. But with only days or even hours notice, members of the EIS fly into war-torn countries to work with refugees, into politically charged anthrax investigations, to Listeria outbreaks afflicting a trailer park. They must be prepared for any situation.
This is a very exciting book! McKenna splits the chapters between the culture and training of the EIS (they have to wear full military uniform every Wednesday, for instance), and their investigation of disease outbreaks. Both are fascinating, but hampered because McKenna insists on writing a full paragraph about the family and professional life of every person mentioned, no matter how tangential. A better book would have focused on a few people, or cut out the sentences about their build and how many children they have.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in public health. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The content was interesting, but the writing was a little boring. High in human interest, low on science. Of course, it probably suffers because I read 'The Hot Zone' shortly before it. Hard to follow that one.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fascinating. I would definitely appreciate any recs for similar books (especially if UK or Europe-based rather than American).
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was fascinated with this book, and sped right through it despite other calls upon my time. I was familiar with the CDC, but was not as familiar with the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIC) that formed the focus of the book. The details of their various outbreaks made for great reading.