Beating Back the Devil by Maryn McKenna, Free Press, $26, ISBN 0743251326 Reviewed by Jonathan Beard
WORKPLACE hazards don’t usually include death. It may be a daily reality for the “special forces” of the US Centers for Disease Control. They face bandits when helping refugees in the Congo and risk death from SARS, a fifth of whose victims were health workers. What keeps them going?
The CDC are famous for their epidemiology, and we tend to think of them as scientists bending over microscopes at the agency’s Atlanta headquarters. The unit called the Epidemic Intelligence Service roams rather than remains…
