Science Archives - Page 10 of 25 - Maryn McKenna

CDC: Superbug NDM-1 Spreads Within a US Hospital

June 21, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Last night, prompted by Michael Coston’s excellent primer on NDM-1 (one of a set of short courses he publishes periodically), I scrolled through the literature to see what had happened recently with the spread of the “Indian superbug” — actually a gene and enzyme that were first spotted in 2008 and create resistance to almost all antibiotics. (My past posts on NDM-1, going back several years, are here.)

There was a lot to see: Cases in countries as varied as Belgium, Japan, Oman, Singapore and China. Indications that transmission of NDM-1, which at first indicated some travel or family connection to South Asia, has become a pan-European problem with clusters in several countries. Concern that international travelers are transporting bacteria containing the gene without realizing it. And, disappointingly, reassurances from within India, in a new study, that it can “easily combat” NDM-1 — though the fact that a study was conducted, as opposed to the problem just being denied out of existence, must be an encouraging sign.

That tour through the literature made me curious what has been happening in the United States since NDM-1 was first identified in patients here two years ago this week, and I made a note to check when I got back to work today. And then the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention forestalled me, by announcing this morning that there have been 13 cases in the United States so far — including two in which the infection apparently spread within the same hospital.

People Want to Eat Meat Raised Without Excessive Antibiotics. Wouldn't You?

June 20, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This news is going to be everywhere today, but it’s solidly in the topics I care about (and you readers care about — at least I think you do), so I’m going to cover it regardless.

The magazine Consumer Reports is publishing a report and poll on US consumers’ attitudes toward the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. From everyone’s reactions when I write about this, I thought people cared about this issue, but the numbers are a little surprising even to me: 86 percent of shoppers in a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults said they wanted meat raised without antibiotics to be available in their local supermarkets. [Read more…]

9-Year-Old Who Changed School Lunches Silenced By Politicians

June 14, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

NeverSeconds’ first school-lunch photo, May 8, 2012. The tubular thing is mashed potatoes in a crust.

[Updated: June 15, 2012. Read to the end for developments!]

For the past two months, one of my favorite reads has been Never Seconds, a blog started by 9-year-old Martha Payne of western Scotland to document the unappealing, non-nutritious lunches she was being served in her public primary school. Payne, whose mother is a doctor and father has a small farming property, started blogging in early May and went viral in days. She had a million viewers within a few weeks and 2 million this morning; was written up in Time, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and a number of food blogs; and got support from TV cheflebrity Jamie Oliver, whose series “Jamie’s School Dinners” kicked off school-food reform in England.

Well, goodbye to all that.

This afternoon, Martha (who goes by “Veg” on the blog) posted that she will have to shut down her blog, because she has been forbidden to take a camera into school. She said: [Read more…]

Beyond Factory Farming: Creating An Appetite For Pastured Poultry

June 11, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I get this a lot: “I understand that the things you write about are important — but they’re so depressing. Couldn’t you write some, you know, good news, for a change?”

So here you go: a solutions post for once, instead of another problem. (But I can’t promise to make a habit of it.)

The Superbugs In Your Dinner: A Storify

June 7, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

As I said Wednesday would happen, I participated in a Twitterchat today about antibiotic-resistant foodborne illnesses arising as a result of agricultural antibiotic use. This is the subject of my investigative piece in the June issue of SELF Magazine. Chat participants were me and blogger and cancer survivor Lisa Bonchek Adams, with many constant readers checking in. And because I’m sure you were all busy, but I want you to know what we talked about, I made a Storify for you. You’re welcome.

Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea: WHO Agrees It's An Emergency

June 6, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Image: KaptainKobold/Flickr

The World Health Organization has weighed in on the growing threat from antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, saying in a statement this morning (emailed, and apparently not online):

Millions of people with gonorrhoea may be at risk of running out of treatment options unless urgent action is taken, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Already several countries, including Australia, France, Japan, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom are reporting cases of resistance to cephalosporin antibiotics — the last treatment option against gonorrhoea. Every year an estimated 106 million people are infected.

The statement arrived as an adjunct to the launch of the WHO’s new global action plan for controlling the spread of resistant gonorrhea.

If you’ve been reading here for a while, the problem of resistant gonorrhea won’t be new to you. (Here are some past posts on data from the CDC and a call to action in the New England Journal of Medicine, along with a piece I wrote in Scientific American and a separate post by my SciAm editor Christine Gorman.) But in case you’ve just come in:

The Superbugs in Your Dinner (Bonus: Twitterchat!)

June 6, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I have a new story up at SELF Magazine, where I’m privileged to do a long and often investigative piece about once a year. This one is close to my heart: It took two years to complete, and in that time I conducted 37 interviews and reviewed several hundred scientific papers.

Here’s what it says: The misuse of antibiotics in agriculture, particularly in livestock-raising, is creating antibiotic-resistant foodborne illnesses that are taking victims and their doctors by surprise.

We talk pretty often here about drug-resistant bacteria arising as a result of farm antibiotic use, and moving off the farm in a variety of ways. There is a lot of dispute, of course, about whether farm-caused antibiotic resistance has much effect on human health, or whether the various resistant illnesses that people contract arise instead from antibiotic misuse in daily life or in hospitals and health care.

But in this case, the illnesses are being caused specifically by classic foodborne bugs that have become resistant and are making people sick when the food is handled or eaten. The evidence is not 100 percent — no evidence ever is — but to me, these illnesses demonstrate the most direct link yet between antibiotic use on farms, and human illness far away from farm areas.

Court Scolds FDA Over Ag Antibiotic Use

June 5, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

There’s been another development in the continuing court battle to get the US Food and Drug Administration to exert some control over agricultural use of growth-promoter antibiotics — and it arrives accompanied by some remarkably direct language from the US magistrate judge hearing the case.

In a Memorandum of Opinion and Order that was filed last Friday afternoon — which I extracted from the PACER system and stashed in my Scribd account — Judge Theodore Katz addresses the FDA’s denial of two citizens’ petitions regarding ag antibiotic use. I’ll explain the details below, but here is the key language:

… the Court finds the Agency’s denial of the Petitions to be arbitrary and capricious. For over thirty years, the Agency has been confronted with evidence of the human health risks associated with the widespread sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in food-producing animals, and, despite a statutory mandate to ensure the safety of animal drugs, the Agency has done shockingly little to address these risks.

Whew. OK, the details:

Food Trade Too Complex to Track Food Safety

June 4, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The data-dense graphic above may be too reduced to read (here’s the really big version), but its intricacy masks a simple and fairly dire message: The global trade in food has become so complex that we have almost lost the ability to trace the path of any food sold into the network. And, as a result, we are also about to lose the ability to track any contaminated food, or any product causing foodborne illness.

The graphic, and warning, come from a paper published last week in PLoS ONE by researchers from the United States, United Kingdom, Hungary and Romania. The group used United Nations food-trade data — along with some math that I do not pretend to understand — to describe an “international agro-food trade network” (IFTN) with seven countries at its center, but a dense web of connections with many others. Each of the seven countries, they find, trades with more than 77 percent of all the 207 countries on which the UN gathers information.

As a result, they say: “The IFTN has become a densely interwoven complex network, creating a perfect platform to spread potential contaminants with practically untraceable origins.”

Chagas Disease: Poverty, Immigration, and the 'New HIV/AIDS'

May 30, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

What if a deadly epidemic was burgeoning and almost nobody noticed?

In the latest issue of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a distinguished group of virologists, epidemiologists and infectious-disease specialists say that’s not a hypothetical question. They argue that Chagas disease, a parasitic infection transmitted by blood-sucking insects, has become so widespread and serious — while remaining largely unrecognized — that it deserves to be considered a public health emergency. Extending the metaphor, they liken Chagas’ stealth spread to the early days of AIDS:

Both diseases are health disparities, disproportionately affecting people living in poverty. Both are chronic conditions requiring prolonged treatment courses… As with patients in the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, most patients with Chagas disease do not have access to health care facilities. Both diseases are also highly stigmatizing, a feature that for Chagas disease further complicates access to … essential medicines, as well as access to serodiagnosis and medical counseling.

That sounds like rhetoric — after all, what disease expert doesn’t think his or her disease is vitally important — but the numbers the experts bring to the argument are stunning. Overall, there are believed to be 10 million people living with Chagas infection; most of them are in Central and South America, but there are an estimated 1 million in the United States. Up to one-third of those infected, 3 million, are at risk of Chagas’ worst complications, enlarged heart and heart failure. And wherever blood donations are not tested for the protozoan, the blood supply — as well as organ transplants — are at risk.

What Industrial Farming Has to Do With Devastated Seas

May 24, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I spent the end of last week at the latest iteration of the Sustainable Foods Institute, an intense two days of discussion that the Monterey Bay Aquarium (home of Seafood Watch, the guide to sustainable seafood choices) puts on every year to bring together journalists, advocates and chefs. The Institute takes place within Cooking for Solutions, an overlapping food and wine conference dedicated to the proposition that sustainability and care for the planet are inseparable from deliciousness.

This is not as universal an idea as you might think. As the conference was opening, the New York Times ran a joint interview with the globally influential chefs Thomas Keller and Andoni Luis Aduriz in which they explicitly rejected ecological concerns over where or from whom they source the food they serve. Keller: “Is global food policy truly our responsibility? … I don’t think so.” Aduriz: “To align yourself entirely with … sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited.” (In a great response piece, Grist food editor Twilight Greenaway explains why their thinking is so short-sighted.)

But “global food policy” ought to be the concern of anyone who raises, grows, catches, fishes, forages, sells or even just eats food — because, as University of Minnesota academic Jonathan Foley said in a devastating talk halfway through the two days: “We’re running out of everything. We’re running out of planet.”

Update: Pakistan, Polio, Fake Vaccines And The CIA

May 23, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Regular readers will remember my ~~outraged rant~~ post from almost a year ago, reacting to the news that the Central Intelligence Agency faked a vaccination campaign in Pakistan as a way of getting close to Osama Bin Laden’s hide-out, hoping to prove his presence by using a vaccine needle to grab a sample of DNA.

I felt, and still feel, that the maneuver — which was belatedly acknowledged by the CIA — was a cynical attempt to hijack the credibility that public health workers have built up over decades with local populations. I especially felt it endangered the status of the fraught polio-eradication campaign, which over the past decade has been challenged in majority-Muslim areas in Africa and South Asia over beliefs that polio vaccination is actually a covert campaign to harm Muslim children — an accusation that seems fantastic, but begins to make sense when you realize some of those areas have perfectly good reasons to distrust vaccination campaigns.

I take no pleasure in saying the prediction came true. [Read more…]

We're Using More of the Few Antibiotics Left

May 16, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

When medicine runs out of effective antibiotics, what does it do?

It turns to the uneffective ones. And patient care suffers.

People on the front lines of antibiotic resistance — infectious-disease physicians and nurses, and the patients sick or unlucky enough to contract a resistant infection — have been insisting for a while that this is happening. Their alarm has not been much-noticed. A paper published this evening might change that. (Link fixed from earlier.)

Mothers, Farmers and Chefs Against Antibiotic Misuse

May 15, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you may remember Everly Macario and her son Simon Sparrow: I told their story in my 2010 book Superbug and blogged about them in 2011. Everly is a public health researcher in Chicago and the sister and daughter of physicians. Yet despite all her own knowledge, and all the knowledge resident in her family, she was unable to protect 17-month-old Simon from the MRSA infection that killed him in 24 hours in 2004.

Simon, as I wrote about him last year, was:

[A] big, sturdy child with no health problems except a touch of asthma. The day before he died, he woke up feverish and disoriented, startling his parents with a cry unlike anything they had heard from him before. It was a busy morning — his older sister had a stomach virus — but they got him to the pediatric ER, got him checked, and brought him home when doctors found nothing unusual going on.

A few hours later, Everly was working at home, watching both kids, and Simon’s breathing changed. Her husband James, a history professor, had driven a few hours away to give a speech. She called a friend who is a pediatrician, held the phone up to Simon’s nose and mouth so she could hear, and then got back on the line.

“Hang up,” her friend said. “Call 911.”

She did, and then she called her husband, who reversed course and began tearing back to the city. At the hospital, Simon failed rapidly: His heart raced, his blood pressure crashed, his lungs filled with fluid. His skin darkened with pinpoint hemorrhages. He died the following morning.

Simon Sparrow. Photo: Courtesy Everly Macario

Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea: How We Lost Track

May 4, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

if I were starting this blog today, I’d be tempted to name it the Department of Unintended Consequences. So much of what I write about seems to belong in that zone: Send U.N. troops to Haiti, start a cholera epidemic. Aim to eradicate wild polio, clear the way for the vaccine-derived kind. Drive down the price of producing animal protein, ramp up antibiotic resistance.

Now add to the list: Develop cheap rapid tests for detecting sexually transmitted diseases, and lose the ability to track that those diseases are becoming resistant to the last antibiotics that work reliably against them.

Science Writing And Denialism: Accuracy, Clarity, Courage

April 28, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

So if it seemed quiet in the blogosphere this week, it may be because most of science-writing’s all-stars (plus me) were in the same room at the University of Wisconsin, talking about subjects that make many people uncomfortable: vaccination, climate change, evolution. The occasion was a conference, “Science Writing in the Age of Denial,” and the point was to get accomplished people talking about hard questions of verification, communication and belief. [Read more…]

Exotic Travel? Take Your Precautions Seriously. (Or Die.)

April 19, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

So, these deadlines: They’ve been intense. (I know, I said last week I thought I was done. I was wrong. But now I think I’m done — though chairing a conference for the rest of the week, so still busy.) While I’ve been underwater, there has been literal tons of news on this blog’s core topics, all of which I need to get back to. But while I’m getting re-oriented, here’s an intriguing piece of news that I stashed last month for consideration. It’s worth thinking about, if you’re planning exotic travel.

TL;DR: If you’re going somewhere where you run the risk of being exposed to a disease that your doctors back home might not recognize, and you can take simple steps to prevent it, you should. Really. Wear your bug repellent, stay out of the stagnant water, keep your skin covered, take your pills. [Read more…]

Antibiotics in Ethanol Grains: Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full?

April 10, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

So hi. Apologies to disappear, constant readers — I was mired in the last revise of a big magazine story (which will be out in two months and will be very exciting). Back now, and catching up. Here’s something that caught my eye yesterday, on a topic that I haven’t looked at since this blog was at its former home: the issue of ethanol-manufacturing leftovers, and whether they contribute to antibiotic resistance in the animals they are fed to.

Quick background: Making ethanol is a lot like brewing beer. You take a starchy carbohydrate, wet it down to make a mash, warm it up, add yeast, and wait. To fuel its reproduction, the yeast digests the carbohydrate; as waste products, it respires carbon dioxide and produces alcohol. (So basically beer is yeast pee, but let’s not get off track.)

Does Foodborne Illness Trigger Lifelong Health Problems?

March 30, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I have a new column up at Scientific American about a health issue that is really just starting to be discussed: Whether foodborne illness causes long-term health problems, and therefore whether it should be a higher medical and public-health priority than it is now.

Quick summary: The few studies that have followed victims of foodborne illness for years afterward show that later in life, they suffer higher-than-usual rates not only of digestive trouble, but of arthritis and kidney problems, as well as greater risk of heart attack and stroke.

More On Court Ordering FDA Hearings on Farm Antibiotics

March 23, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Since I posted last night on the judge’s order that the Food and Drug Administration examine the safety of farm antibiotics — via hearings that the Food and Drug Administration scheduled, but never held, back in 1977 — a lot has happened. Here’s a round-up.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, lead plaintiffs in the suit (with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Animal Concerns Trust, Public Citizen and Union of Concerned Scientists) has put up a press release/explainer, accompanied by a blog post written by ~~lead~~ attorney Avinash Kar. (Correction: The lead attorney is Jen Sorenson.) Key quote from Kar:

The judge’s opinion makes it clear that FDA’s voluntary approach—letting the industry police itself—does not satisfy its legal obligations. FDA must schedule hearings to let drug manufacturers make their case, and if the drug manufacturers cannot prove that the use of antibiotics in animal feed is safe, FDA must withdraw approval for those drug uses.

Kar’s comment to me: “We think this is a great step forward for public health. For 35 years, FDA has basically sat on the sidelines, mostly letting the industry police itself. In that time we have seen a massive rise in the occurrence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This means we now will ensure that we preserve these lifesaving medicines for those who need them most.”

I asked the press office this morning at the Center for Veterinary Medicine, the FDA division named in the order, if the agency has a response yet. They said: “We are studying the opinion and considering appropriate next steps.”

« Previous Page
1
…
8
9
10
11
12
…
25
Next Page »