Deadly Outbreaks: How Medical Detectives Save Lives Threatened by Killer Pandemics, Exotic Viruses, and Drug-Resistant Parasites

Despite advances in health care, infectious microbes continue to be a formidable adversary to scientists and doctors. Vaccines and antibiotics, the mainstays of modern medicine, have not been able to conquer infectious microbes because of their amazing ability to adapt, evolve, and spread to new places. Terrorism aside, one of the greatest dangers from infectious disease we face today is from a massive outbreak of drug-resistant microbes.

Deadly Outbreaks recounts the scientific adventures of a special group of intrepid individuals who investigate these outbreaks around the world and figure out how to stop them. Part homicide detective, part physician, these medical investigators must view the problem from every angle, exhausting every possible source of contamination. Any data gathered in the field must be stripped of human sorrows and carefully analyzed into hard statistics.

Author Dr. Alexandra Levitt is an expert on emerging diseases and other public health threats. Here she shares insider accounts she’s collected that go behind the alarming headlines we’ve seen in the media: mysterious food poisonings, unexplained deaths at a children’s hospital, a strange neurologic disease afflicting slaughterhouse workers, flocks of birds dropping dead out of the sky, and drug-resistant malaria running rampant in a refugee camp. Meet the resourceful investigators—doctors, veterinarians, and research scientists—and discover the truth behind these cases and more.

Dr. Alexandra Levitt is a health scientist at the CDC who began her scientific career as a research scientist at New York University Medical School. During a fellowship year as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Diplomacy Fellow assigned to the US Department of State, Dr. Levitt coordinated a government-wide review of the global health and security threat posed by emerging infectious diseases. Since joining the CDC in 1995, she has prepared policy reports on global health, bioterrorism, and pandemic influenza, and drafted critical case studies of large and unusual outbreak responses, including the 1994 outbreak of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome in the United States.; the 1994 outbreak of plague in India; and the 1995 outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Dr. Levitt resides in Brooklyn, New York.