Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service - Hardcover

McKenna, Maryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743251326 ISBN 13: 9780743251327

Publisher: Free Press, 2004

Synopsis

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. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Maryn McKenna was the Knight Fellow in Medicine at the University of Michigan's Schools of Medicine and Public Health.

Reviews

They are medicine's rapid-reaction force, an elite cadre of highly trained disease detectives who are poised to go anywhere on a few hours' notice to investigate a threat to public health. As science journalist Maryn McKenna makes clear in Beating Back the Devil (Free Press, $26) -- her deeply researched portrait of the class of 2002 of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- their work is by turns terrifying, exhilarating, gritty and exhausting. In other words, it bears almost no resemblance to network television's portrayal of medical investigators.

In the real world, as McKenna makes clear, EIS officers, many of them doctors just out of residency, do not spend their two years of on-the-job training barking orders into state-of-the-art cell phones or engaging in long, soulful chats with the relatives of deathly ill patients. Their focus is on "shoe leather epidemiology" -- conducting interviews in the field and painstakingly collecting and analyzing reams of data to ferret out the source of an epidemic.

A senior medical writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who has covered the CDC for seven years, McKenna shadowed members of the first class to train after Sept. 11, 2001. Like their predecessors, many will go on to assume leading roles in state and federal health agencies or in academic medicine. But unlike previous classes in the 50-year history of the EIS, theirs was the first group whose training started with a bioterrorism drill.

One of the book's most chilling chapters involves training the group about what to do in the event of a suspected poison gas attack. During the exercise, a trainer informs a recruit whose mask wasn't sufficiently airtight, "You realize, if this were a real emergency, you'd be dead by now."

McKenna juxtaposes the history of the EIS, created in 1951 out of an erroneous concern that American soldiers had been exposed to biological agents during the Korean War, with modern examples of its mission: in Zaire, assisting overwhelmed officials with a 1994 cholera epidemic triggered by war; in Philadelphia in 2002, investigating an outbreak of listeriosis, a rare pathogen caused by tainted turkey breast.

One of the book's most interesting chapters recounts the role of an unsung EIS officer who was an integral part of a team of Los Angeles scientists who told the world about the first five American cases of a baffling sexually transmitted disease among gay men, later named AIDS.

At times McKenna gets sidetracked by minutiae, such as whether the disease detectives should be required to wear uniforms. But overall her book provides a revealing glimpse into the little-known world of deeply committed investigators who trade two years of their lives to be on the front lines of public health.

First Responders
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Founded in 1951 because of a mistaken concern that troops in Korea had been exposed to biological weapons, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS, is the rapid-response force of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Young, highly trained, and fiercely committed," EIS health professionals, including doctors, dentists, nurses and veterinarians, respond rapidly and travel to any area of the world to examine possible threats to public health. Given unique access to the EIS, McKenna presents 11 case studies of epidemics, environmental threats and acts of terrorism EIS has dealt with. McKenna puts readers on the scene with doctors discovering the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in 1980. She tells of an EIS team that in 1994 traveled to Zaire to assist in a cholera epidemic sparked by a genocidal war. After 9/11, EIS investigated the anthrax attacks that were spread through the mails. McKenna, a senior medical writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, provides an inside look at how EIS workers are trained. Recruits, selected through a competitive process, are given refresher courses in epidemiology, statistical analysis and interviewing techniques before beginning a two-year on-the-job training. McKenna’s personal portraits of these dedicated health professionals illuminate the bravery as well as the anxiety that accompany this demanding work.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Many federal agencies seem challenged when it comes to identifying enemies, but not agents of the Centers for Disease Control's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS). The enemy for them is whatever illness is causing chaos with human health. Usually a germ or a virus, the culprit may be previously unknown, but it is always the enemy. What frequently gives these disease warriors pause, however, is an enemy's origin. To ascertain it, they must put all their medical and scientific detection skills into play, sometimes placing their own health on the line. The work of these highly specialized detectives is occasionally dramatic, often tedious, but always engaging. Interspersing enlightening flashbacks that show how the EIS has dealt with such public health threats as polio, smallpox, West Nile virus, and TB, science writer McKenna job-shadows the CDC's fifty-first class of EIS agents as they are put through grueling training sessions that, for the first time in the service's existence, include how to respond to the threat of biological terrorism. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743251326
• ISBN 13: 9780743251327
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320