Beating Back the Devil
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Narrated by:
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Ellen Archer
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By:
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Maryn McKenna
About this listen
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. Formally called the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), they have confronted outbreaks of AIDS, Ebola virus, toxic shock syndrome, and E. coli 0157; they have helped eradicate smallpox and push back polio. Now they hunt down the deadly threats that dominate our headlines: SARS, West Nile virus, and anthrax.
In this riveting narrative, Maryn McKenna follows the first class of disease detectives to come to the CDC after 9/11. She goes on scene with these talented young researchers, who trade two years of low pay and extremely long hours for the chance to be part of the group who heroically tries to stop epidemics...before they stop us.
©2004 Maryn McKenna (P)2004 Tantor Media, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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Story
The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. This incredible discovery was sulfa, the first antibiotic medication. In The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager chronicles the dramatic history of the drug that shaped modern medicine.
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Great Book!!!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 05-21-08
By: Thomas Hager
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The Great Influenza
- The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
- By: John M. Barry
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 19 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In the winter of 1918, at the height of World War I, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision between modern science and epidemic disease.
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Great book but very disturbing...
- By Tim on 01-15-09
By: John M. Barry
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Splendid Solution
- Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio
- By: Jeffrey Kluger
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Salk became a cultural hero and icon for a whole generation. Now, at the fiftieth anniversary of the first national vaccination program, and as humanity is tantalizingly close to eradicating polio worldwide, comes this unforgettable chronicle. Salk's work was an unparalleled achievement, and it makes for a magnificent listen.
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Excellent book
- By Tim on 08-10-06
By: Jeffrey Kluger
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How to Survive a Plague
- The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
- By: David France
- Narrated by: Rory O'Malley
- Length: 24 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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A riveting, powerful telling of the story of the grassroots movement of activists, many of them in a life-or-death struggle, who seized upon scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease. Ignored by public officials, religious leaders, and the nation at large, and confronted with shame and hatred, this small group of men and women chose to fight for their right to live by educating themselves and demanding to become full partners in the race for effective treatments.
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Read This Book!
- By Kay M Hawklee on 05-30-17
By: David France
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Bellevue
- Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital
- By: David Oshinsky
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.
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Fascinating
- By Jean on 12-14-16
By: David Oshinsky
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Asleep
- The Forgotten Epidemic That Became Medicine’s Greatest Mystery
- By: Molly Caldwell Crosby
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims - who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.
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Scary, and still unsolved, medical mystery
- By joyce on 12-14-14
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Lab 257
- The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory
- By: Michael Christopher Carroll
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Strictly off limits to the public, Plum Island is home to virginal beaches, cliffs, forests, ponds - and the deadliest germs that have ever roamed the planet. Lab 257 blows the lid off the stunning true nature and checkered history of Plum Island. It shows that the seemingly bucolic island in the shadow of New York City is a ticking biological time bomb that none of us can safely ignore.
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More Politics Than Science
- By A Customer on 05-26-17
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Polio
- An American Story
- By: David M. Oshinsky
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 14 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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This comprehensive and gripping narrative, which received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for history, covers all the challenges, characters, and controversies in America's relentless struggle against polio. Funded by philanthropy and grassroots contributions, Salk's killed-virus vaccine (1954) and Sabin's live-virus vaccine (1961) began to eradicate this dreaded disease.
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Wonderful
- By Patricia B Tripoli on 07-22-08
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The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl
- How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis
- By: Arthur Allen
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.
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An Unforgettable book
- By Jean on 09-01-14
By: Arthur Allen
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Heart
- A History
- By: Sandeep Jauhar
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As cardiologist and best-selling author Sandeep Jauhar tells in The Heart, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that changed the way we live. Deftly alternating between historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ.
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Fascinating Insight
- By Ironcharles on 10-27-18
By: Sandeep Jauhar
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The American Plague
- The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History
- By: Molly Caldwell Crosby
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country - and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism," it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.
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Yellow Fever in Memphis
- By Kevin P Key on 04-13-20
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Great Book!!!!!
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A riveting thriller reminiscent of The Hot Zone, this true story dives into the mystery surrounding one of the most controversial and misdiagnosed conditions of our time - Lyme disease - and of Willy Burgdorfer, the man who discovered the microbe behind it, revealing his secret role in developing bug-borne biological weapons and raising terrifying questions about the genesis of the epidemic of tick-borne diseases affecting millions of Americans today.
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Important Exposé on Lyme Disease and Bio-Weapons
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Much thriller, not so much science
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What listeners say about Beating Back the Devil
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Horace
- 12-07-06
Interesting but Not Captivating
I’m very interested in the subject, so I expected to be more interested than I really was. Looking back on it I’m still not sure why I wasn’t more drawn to this book.
I think that the problem can be summarized in the following observation. It attempts to deal with the personal stories of individuals, which dulls the edge of what might otherwise be a more documentary or scientific style, and yet the character development isn’t sufficient to really bond with the individuals involved. In the end it’s neither a brilliant expozay nor an emotionally compelling drama. It dabbles in both, but commits to neither.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Rio Delta Wild
- 11-30-06
difficult to follow
The original editor of this book could have made the story much easier to follow. Perhaps explanatory introductions in the audio work might have helped. Jumps in focus from such topics as a CDC worker's pregnancy to disease outbreaks scattered around the world left me lurching from disease to disease, often uncertain as to when the topics had shifted from one disease to another. This is my 2nd listen, and I'm still perpetually confused, even with a basic understanding of most of the diseases covered.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Tim
- 07-23-05
Interesting Stuff - Only criticism is pacing
This is an interesting book in many ways, although it ended up being somewhat different than I anticipated. The story traces the history of the CDC and then gives a number of examples of epidemics discovered and/or dispelled. With titles like "AIDS - 1981, Los Angeles", "Polio - 1955, Atlanta" one can easily see how the book is organized.
Many of the chapters have very interesting information about the nature of the diseases. The chapters on Polio, Smallpox, Listeriosis & West Nile Virus were fascinating. For those of us born since the eradication of Polio, it was interesting to know, for example, how prevalent Polio was and when it attacked. I also did not realize what our nation's reaction was when the polio vaccine was first announced - very interesting!
I was also dumbfounded by the continuing poor public policy decisions that contribute to disease, both here and abroad. The chapter on staph infection (in 2003 in Los Angeles) highlights the dangers when political correctness and bowing to special interest groups result in abandoning common sense decisions about matters of life and death.
My only criticism of the book is that what is inherently a very suspense filled subject was not taken advantage of by the author (in my opinion). For example, the flow of the book could have been improved had the author started with a story about one of the epidemics (to grab your interest) and then gone back and addressed the history of the organization (and possibly in bite-sized chunks). As a result, those less diligent may abandon a very good book too early because their appetite for discovering the history of the organization was not whetted by the author.
This criticism is, in the end, fairly minor and for those who read a lot and are used to this kind of thing (think of Simon Winchester's "Krakatoa", which spent 1/2 of the book getting to the explosion) will weather it well and be rewarded by their diligence.
Good read!
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37 people found this helpful
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- Tim
- 04-18-19
Phantom Itches
I heard about this book from a Podcast that I listen to. They had an episode on the Measles epidemic that is going on. "Beating Back the Devil" was published in 2004, about 15 years ago. As a germ freak, I was scratching myself from phantom itches as I was reading this book. This book had concrete information on all outbreaks that we had in the past.
I have a friend that works for CDC. Whenever we meet up, I always cringe on what she is going to tell me to look out for. There are some things that you shouldn't know, but I've always gone toward to fear.
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Overall
- Laura
- 10-27-09
Almost excellent!
I enjoyed this book - I hadn't realized the worldwide role of the CDC and how it has changed over the years.
There are some parts where this is too much personal information about the workers. She spends time describing their physical appearance and personal histories, and then the rest of the essence of what is said about this is basically "their job is really stressful". Overall, these parts are brief and it is easy to focus on the more historical and fact based ideas.
The reader has a nice voice, but mispronounces words in a way that distracted me. She also seems to be reading the text for the first time, as her intonation sometimes sounds like a sentence has ended, but then she reads the rest of it. But she's not bad as far as readers go.
Overall, a fasicanting listen!
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall
- L.
- 03-04-06
Good to Know Info
If you're researching with a coming pandemic in mind, this book is a must.
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2 people found this helpful
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- K
- 05-11-14
Great Read on Training Disease Detectives
This book tracks the training of the public health service's disease detectives. It's like Dick Couch's The Warrior Elite for medicine. Fabulous. Along the way, you learn a lot about the tracking down of pathogens and the 2001 anthrax outbreak.
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2 people found this helpful
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- TBeck
- 07-31-15
Excellent stories. The reader needs help
The stories were fascinating. So interesting to hear about the different and that makes it have occurred and how the CD. I had a hard time with the person reading the book because she could not pronounce some of the words. I also was annoyed by the way she paused every time somebody said something and then change her voice and say "he said."
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1 person found this helpful
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- Son
- 10-23-18
Glad this story covered
The history of the EIS is well covered and given a nice dramatic flair. The reader mispronounces some things which as usual drove me nuts. Great purchase (would be great as an actual book as well)
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