Virus Ground Zero

By: Ed Regis

Narrated by: Rob McQuay

In a destitute hospital in the crowded African city of Kikwit, townspeople, nurses, and doctors are dying of a gruesome disease at the rate of more than a dozen a day. Zaire is on the brink of an explosive epidemic - but the outbreak is stopped when experts from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta arrive in the city, reclaim the hospital, and interrupt the chain of virus transmission. With remarkable speed, the CDC's virus detectives trace the outbreak back to its first human case, travel to the "viral ground zero" where the Ebola virus burst out of the jungle, and trap a vast collection of animals that potentially harbor the virus - including the rats overrunning their hotel rooms. It's all in a day's work for the CDC's disease cowboys, who risk their lives daily at the bottom of nature to confront the world's deadliest pathogens. Now acclaimed science writer Ed Regis takes us on a fascinating odyssey across the viral frontier, chronicling the CDC's extraordinary fifty-year history against the backdrop of the 1995 Ebola outbreak - and exploding the media-driven myth of "the coming plague." Starting from a small government agency founded for the purpose of eradicating malaria from the United States in the 1940s, the CDC has grown into a disease-fighting behemoth whose sphere of action is the entire planet. Virus Ground Zero shows how the CDC's viral shock troops have helped remove one deadly virus from the face of the earth, are scheduled to do the same with another by the year 2000, and have similar lethal plans for a whole range of other microbes.

Ed Regis, Regal As Always!

If you want to read a history of the CDC and its epic battle against the virus world, through about 1996, read this book. If you want to read more of, or discover one of America's most informative and entertaining science writers, read this book. If you want a fresh and inside angle on the battle against viruses, read this book. Of course, viruses are no laughing matter, but the entertaining angles include painting virus chasing media like paparazzi, making virus chasing CDC workers look like cowboys going off to Africa to lasso some ebola as a resume builder and describing the CDC bureaucracy spreading like a virus itself!

Other great books by Regis include "Great Mambo Chicken" about wacky cryogenicists, and "The Info Mesa" about the effects of computer simulation on pharmaceutical product development. Of course, since the pub date of "Virus: Ground Zero" in 1998, a lot has happened in the virus world. If you want to read something far more recent on the virus world, I reco "Bad Advice" by Paul Offet,, an epidemiologist prominent enough to appear on CNN many times, for instance. He makes the great distinction between science (a pure ideal) and scientists, who sometimes fall off proscribed ideal methods.

Fantastic listen.

I was actually looking for more of Robert McQuays work and came across this. I really didn’t much about virus’ or the CDC, but after listening to this and of course living through COVID, I now find the subject matter both terrifying and fascinating.

overlong essay

Mr. Regis clearly has a perspective -- that virus are not as much a threat to public safety as the media has hyped them to be, and that the CDC is a overblown bureaucracy. Great, but it's not a book -- it's an essay. There is no interesting scientific information on Viruses -- it feels like a compilation of unedited notes left over from magazine articles. The reader does terrible 'accent voices' for the quotes -- this is annoying.