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Charles Allen (Jacket photography) and Chris Hasto. Very good in Very good jacket. x, [2], 303, [5] pages. Notes on Sources, Selected Bibliography. Index. Inscribed on the fep by the author. The inscription reads for Matt--warm regards, Maryn McKenna 13 oct 04. Also signed by the author on the title page. Minor page discoloration noted. A portrait of the detective corps of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shares behind-the-scenes information about their work in countering such threats as SARS, the anthrax attacks, and the West Nile virus. Maryn McKenna is an American author and journalist. She has written for Nature, National Geographic, and Scientific American. In 2012, she was awarded an Ethics & Justice Investigative Journalism Fellowship at The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. In 2013, she joined the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on a Fellowship. McKenna has written for Nature, Scientific American, Wired and the National Geographic, and has been a staff reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer, the Boston Herald and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her book Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service is about the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her book Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA is about methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus; a CDC posted review called it "an extensively researched and detailed review". Her article "Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future" is included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014. 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, 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 — 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.
