IN THE 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.
Maryn McKenna is a journalist, author and blogger who writes about domestic and global public health, infectious disease, and food policy, but it's OK with her if you just call her Scary Disease Girl, since almost everyone else does.
She has reported from inside a field hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a village on Thailand's west coast that was erased by the Indian Ocean tsunami, a CDC team investigating the anthrax-letter attacks on Capitol Hill, a graveyard within the Arctic Circle that held victims of the 1918 flu, a malaria hospital in Malawi, an isolation ward for multi-drug resistant TB in Vietnam and a polio-eradication team in India. She untangled birds from mist nets during the first US outbreaks of West Nile virus, triggered the first Congressional hearings on Gulf War Syndrome, and pried loose enough hidden history at a closed nuclear-weapons plant to help local residents win a nuclear-harm lawsuit against the US government.
She is the author of the newly published SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010), an investigation of the global epidemic of drug-resistant staph, and BEATING BACK THE DEVIL: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (FP/S&S, 2004), a narrative history of the CDC's disease detectives that was named a Top Science Book by Amazon and an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association.
She is a blogger for Wired, writes for SELF, More, Health and other national magazines, and is a regular contributor to the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Previously, she was a staff reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Boston Herald, and the Cincinnati Enquirer, and a contributing writer at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy of the University of Minnesota.
She has a bachelor's from Georgetown University, a master's from Northwestern University, and has won numerous journalism awards. She has been a fellow with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the East-West Center of Honolulu, the Knight-Wallace Program of the University of Michigan, Harvard Medical School and the Casey Journalism Center for Children and Families at the University of Maryland. She teaches science writing in the U.S. and Asia.
She lives in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and occasionally in Maine and France, and almost always has latex gloves and a face-mask somewhere close by
