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Maryn McKenna

Photo: Chris Haston

Maryn McKenna, contributing writer for CIDRAP News, is a journalist specializing in domestic and global public health and health policy. She is currently a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Media Fellow.

From 1995-2006, she worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she was the only US journalist assigned to full-time coverage of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). On that beat, she reported from Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Arctic, as well as from within a CDC investigative team during the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks. Previously, she worked for the Boston Herald, where her stories on illnesses among veterans led to the first Congressional hearings on Gulf War Syndrome, and at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where her investigation of local cancer clusters contributed to a successful citizens' nuclear-harm lawsuit against the US government.

Ms. McKenna is a cum laude graduate of Georgetown University and has a master's degree with highest honors from Northwestern University. She has held fellowships at Harvard Medical School and the University of Maryland and in 1998-1999 was the Knight-Wallace Fellow in Medicine at the University of Michigan's schools of medicine and public health. In 2006 she was an inaugural health journalism fellow of the East-West Center in Honolulu and is now an associate of the Center.

Ms. McKenna has won numerous journalism awards and is the author of Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which was named a "Top Science Book" by Amazon.com and an "Outstanding Academic Title" by the American Library Association.