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.
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