Research Catalog

Title

Beating back the devil : on the front lines with the disease detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service / Maryn McKenna.

Author

McKenna, Maryn.

Publication

New York : Free Press, c2004.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 303 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

• In war against diseases, they are the Special Forces. 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. McKenna takes readers to the frontline of a never-ending war, as the Epidemic Intelligence Service (E.I.S.) tries to track down and stop new health threats like SARS, anthrax, and West Nile Virus before it's too late.

Subject

• Centers for Disease Control (U.S.)
• Centers for Disease Control (U.S.). Epidemic Intelligence Service
• Centers for Disease Control (U.S.). Epidemic Intelligence Service > Popular works
• Epidemiology > Popular works
• Epidemiologists > United States > Popular works
• Epidemiology > history
• History, 20th Century

Genre/Form

• Popular works
• Popular works.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 272-289) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Prologue : July 2002, Anniston, Alabama -- Training : July 2002, Atlanta -- Polio : 1955, Atlanta -- West Nile virus : August-October 2002, Atlanta -- Smallpox : 1972, Bangladesh -- Listeriosis : August-November 2002, Philadelphia -- AIDS : 1981, Los Angeles -- Uniformity : November-December 2002, Atlanta -- War : 1994, Zaire -- Malaria : March 2003, Malawi -- Tuberculosis : 1999-2000, Baltimore and New York -- Drug-resistant staphylococcus : March-June 2003, Los Angeles -- Terrorism : 2001, New York City and Washington, D.C. -- SARS : March-July 2003, Hanoi and Bangkok -- Epilogue : July-September 2003.

ISBN

0743251326

LCCN

^^2004053214

OCLC

• 55729837
• SCSB-10474266

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library