The ScienceBlogs Book Club

How Do You Value What Didn't Happen?

Category: Inside the Outbreaks

Karen Starko writes: When the "financial crisis" started and the news media started throwing around numbers in the trillions and projected fixes in the billions, I realized I just didn't get it. So I got a little yellow post-it, labeled...

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Posted by Karen Starko at 9:18 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Solving Puzzles vs. Solving Problems

Category: Inside the Outbreaks

Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the...

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Posted by Liz Borkowski at 12:28 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Number-Crunching at the EIS and Why Public Health is Politics

Category: epidemiology

Mark Pendergrast writes: Thanks to commentators Liz Borkowski, Karen Starko, Steve Schoenbaum, and Mark Rosenberg for their thoughtful posts, though it appears that Mark Rosenberg's post got cut off after his first-paragraph query asking why anyone would go into the...

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Posted by Mark Pendergrast at 3:56 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Reading Between the Lines

Category: epidemiology

Steve Schoenbaum writes: "Inside the Outbreaks", Mark Pendergrast's wonderful history of the Centers for Disease Control's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), can be read on many levels. I confess that as a former EIS officer (1967-1969), personally familiar with most of...

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Posted by Steve Schoenbaum at 12:01 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Meet the rest of the Inside the Outbreaks Book Club contributors

Category: Inside the Outbreaks

In addition to author Mark Pendergrast, we have four more outstanding contributors here to discuss Inside the Outbreaks over the next few weeks. Though they all come from public health backgrounds, their experiences in and with the Epidemic Intelligence Service...

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Posted by Erin Johnson at 4:23 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Why would anyone do this work?

What is it that drives people to public health in general and to EIS in particular? Public health is notorious for being the lowest paid medical specialty of all. In addiiton, when you work to prevent diseases and injuries you...

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Posted by Mark Rosenberg at 11:57 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Success of the EIS and the Case Study Method

Category: Inside the Outbreaks

Karen Starko writes: Even though I am a former EIS officer I am still amazed by the many successes of the EIS that Mark Pendergrast so clearly details in Inside the Outbreaks, The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence...

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Posted by Karen Starko at 12:48 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Epidemiology Superheroes

Category: Inside the Outbreaks

Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast's Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service is a fast-paced tour through nearly six decades of epidemiology achievements by this relatively small program of the Centers for Disease Control and...

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Posted by Liz Borkowski at 9:01 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Inside the Outbreaks

Category: Medicine

Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion. The origin of the book...

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Posted by Mark Pendergrast at 1:03 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Meet Mark Pendergrast, author of Inside the Outbreaks

Category: Inside the Outbreaks

Before writing Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, Atlanta native Mark Pendergrast authored a history of another of the city's cornerstone institutions, the Coca-Cola company, in addition to a history of coffee and...

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Posted by Erin Johnson at 11:06 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks