Inside the Outbreaks
kstarko | June 22, 2010Karen 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 Service. As I reflect on the outbreaks and epidemics described in the book and my own experience, I realize that the case study method employed in the training course and the two-year hands-on program plays a critical role in the success of the EIS program.
Picture this: young doctors, nurses, veterinarians, and other health professionals, many barely out of…
lborkowski | June 22, 2010The ScienceBlogs Book Club has come back to life, and is now featuring Mark Pendergrast's Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. Mark Pendergrast's introductory post is well worth a read. He describes Alexander Langmuir, the "visionary leader" who founded the Epidemic Intelligence Service within the CDC in 1951; gives examples of some of the many different kinds of outbreaks EIS officers deal with; and identifies some of the ways the EIS has evolved over the past several decades.
I'll be putting up a couple of posts about Inside the Outbreaks…
lborkowski | June 22, 2010Liz 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 Prevention. It's a fast and fascinating read, and its episodic structure makes it an easy book to carry around and dip into whenever you've a got a few minutes of free time.
The public-health professionals who join the EIS - usually for two-year stints, though some stay longer - are often young and willing to take risks…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark 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 goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
ejohnson | June 21, 2010
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 two other books.
Pendergrast graduated from Harvard with a degree in English literature before receiving his Masters degree in library science from Simmons College. In 1991 he began writing full-time, and his articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Financial Analyst, among other…
ejohnson | June 14, 2010Is it distant thunder? A passing freight train? World Cup fans celebrating a goal?
Nope...that's the sound of the ScienceBlogs Book Club becoming active again!
It's been awhile since we hosted a Book Club discussion here on the blog - not since Paul Offitt's Autism's False Prophets back in 2008 - but we thought it was about time to get things going again. Luckily Mark Pendergrast, author of the recently published Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service agreed to lead a discussion of the book, and starting next week you can follow along…