Deadly Outbreaks

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

By: Alexandra Levitt

Narrated by: Julie McKay

Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

Take a visit to the frontline as scientists fight to solve medical mysteries.

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.

©2013 Alexandra Levitt (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

The delivery really kills this one

One of my favorite topics for nonfiction books. However, it's REALLY hard to get past the narrator on this one. It seems to plod along in a very monotone delivery. Common acronyms are spelled out rather than pronounced phonetically (USAMRIID for example). The organization of the chapters seems to vary as well.

Narrator un-listenable. Captain Kirk at 1/2 speed.

The material, while done and redone by others before was at least interesting. I had to return it for credit after a few hours because of the narration. The woman sounded like Captain Kirk on heavy sedation. Within the first 5 minutes I cranked it up to 1.25 X speed because she spoke so slowly that It hurt my ears. Even 1.25 was too slow but 1.5X sounded strange. And she had unnatural pauses the way William Shatner did in Star Trek. "The...virus was a particularly.............virulent....strain.....that hadn't been.....seen.....before." Oh, my. Not trying to make fun, but it was awful. After the 7th time of hearing "USAMRIID" spelled out "u-s-a-m-r-i-i-d" I threw in the towel. I'll get a used copy of the book or get it on Kindle if I really want to finish it.

Beautifully written and narrated

I really enjoyed listening to this book. But the Chapter narration does not match the chapter displayed.

I like this stuff

I don’t know why but I love to read/listen to books about outbreaks and viruses. This is a solid book about outbreaks I remember from when I was younger. It doesn’t include the COVID outbreak but it details how they are investigated and hunted down.

Lots of detail on epidemiological procedures.

If you or someone you know is considering a career in epidemiology or microbiology, this is a fascinating introduction to some of the concepts and procedures used by epidemiologists. It's loaded with genuine science rather than morbid details and fear-mongering. Don't you want to know how Sin Nombre virus was discovered? How about the emergence of Legionnaire's Disease? Despite the details that probably require a rewind or two for us lay folk to understand what's going on, the "plot" moves at a nice pace. The narration is pleasant to listen to, and more animated than many non-fiction narrations. An excellent book, though unfortunately getting a little bit dated from a post-Covid point of view.

Narration was the struggle

The mispronounced words. Worth hiring a person with some biology background to read next time.

A bit too "human interest" for me.

When the science was presented, it was presented well, with a good balance of information for the layperson interested in epidemiology, like myself. It was the biographies of the people involved, how the personnel were recently married, or engaged, were introverts or extroverts, etc, etc, that lost my interest. I was interested in some of the science and history of epidemiology, not particularly in mini-biographies of some epidemiologists.

Also, and this annoyed me the whole chapter, a serial murder, while interesting in another context, is not an "outbreak." Even if it was thought to be an outbreak prior to investigation. I felt that chapter, three, I think, should have been in another book entirely.

Finally, the narration was adequate at best. A friend who I gave a ride to asked if this was an AI voice assistant reading the book, like Alexa or SIri. The sentences had odd breaks e.g. "hundreds... of thousands," the words were often oddly or over enunciated... I could only wish for better in the future.

Exciting tales of mystery diseases

The book is great. As a microbiologist I already knew most of the diseases, but the investigations to find the causes and how the EIS, health departments, other organizations and lab personnel worked with medical personnel and patients were covered in an insightful and interesting manner. The reader needs to learn how to pronounce scientific words and acronyms. USAMRIID is pronounced you-SAM-rid, not spelled out. ELISA is pronounced with a long I, not as eleesa. Her frequent mispronunciations drove me crazy, but the book was great enough to ignore them. Each chapter is a biological mystery. If you are at all interested in biology, epidemiology or even good mysteries you will enjoy this book.

Too many acronyms and too slow

Within a few sentences I immediately set the speed to 1.1 because the narrator’s lethargic reading rate was annoying. The author’s use of acronyms for everything makes understanding difficult. It’s like she’s too lazy to write West Nile or New York. Not the best.

Med student perspective

I really like infectious disease and just finished the hot zone and loved it. I can’t tell if it’s the narrator or the writing but this book is kinda dense. Even when I got into a story (who poisoned the babies with digoxin?!) it would drag until I lost interested. But the narrator really made it worse. The way she pronounced acronyms drove me nuts. She seemed to pause between each letter or something? I don’t know. But I couldn’t continue once I lost focus. It worked relatively well as a book to put me to sleep however.