Journalist and Author
Welcome back, folks. An update: For the next few days, myself and many of my Wired Science colleagues will be at Science Online, a fantastic blog (and video, audio, general awesomeness) conference that is held each year in North Carolina. Unfortunately there’s no video feed this year, but if you’d like to to follow us […]
Constant readers: Today, Wikipedia is locked, Boing Boing is dark, and I join with many bloggers much more important than me to protest legislation that would destroy the Internet as we know it. Superbug is dark today to protest the ill-conceived Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP […]
Two totally drug-resistant-tuberculosis patients recently came forward hundreds of miles away from the disease’s original epicenter — but one has gone missing. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
The earliest known cases of totally resistant tuberculosis, or TDR, weren’t the current 12 known cases in Mumbai or the 15 cases in Iran in 2009, but rather two women from Italy who died in 2003 after being sick for several years. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
Physicians in Mumbai, India are calling a new strain of tuberculosis TDR, for Totally Drug-Resistant. In other words, it is untreatable as far as they know. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
Today, the FDA announced that it is forbidding certain agricultural uses of a class of antibiotics known as cephalosporins. While limiting the use of these drugs is a step in the right direction, this class makes up only a small fraction of the antibiotics used in agriculture, and the new rule has exceptions. The move is good news for doctors, however, because cephalosporins are among the limited antibiotics approved for pediatric use, and protecting their usefulness is vital.
Happy New Year, constant readers. It seems to be impossible to get past Dec. 31 without a year-end list of some kind, and in the past 48 hours, many, many science bloggers have responded to that impulse by listing their own favorite posts or the ones they liked best that were written by others. (There’s […]
The FDA has backed off a 34-year attempt to assert regulatory control over “growth promoter” antibiotic use, opting instead for voluntary self-policing by the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna explains.
With no notice other than a holiday-eve posting in the Federal Register, the US Food and Drug Administration has reneged on its long-stated intention to compel large-scale agriculture to curb over-use of agricultural antibiotics, which it had planned to do by reversing its approval for putting penicillin and tetracyclines in feed.
Meet a young mom who lost her feet, an arm and her sight to a largely unknown syndrome called sepsis that affects 750,000 Americans each year and kills between one quarter and one half of them.
There’s huge news today in biomedical research — a little outside my core topics, but so important that I thought it was worth highlighting for you anyway. A report by the Institute of Medicine has declared that most research on chimps in the United States is unnecessary and should cease. Experiments should only continue if […]
Sleeping with your pets, kissing their faces and letting them kiss you can increase the chances of contracting a range of unpleasant diseases. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
Fecal transplants that cure intestinal diseases are minimally invasive, reliable, cheap and have a durable clinical history. Ick factor-powered regulations, however, are blocking treatments. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
Maps of antibiotic use in the United States look very similar to maps of obesity, heart attacks, diabetes and stroke. Could there be a connection?
Two new studies confirm, once again, that drug-resistant staph or MRSA — normally thought of as a problem in hospitals — is showing up in animals and in the meat those animals become. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna weighs in.
In the United States, it’s been “Get Smart About Antibiotics” Week this past week, an annual observance in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its medical and public health partners try to raise awareness of antibiotic resistance. The real action this week though was in Europe, where individual researchers and the EU’s […]
The European Parliament has voted to end “prophylactic use” of antibiotics in farming, and to prevent any “last resort” antibiotics from being used in animals. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
It’s very odd sometimes watching how the same issues play out in different parts of the world. The French environment ministry confidently ascribes the growth of seaweed choking its beaches to farm runoff. The European Parliament denounces the establishment of very large-scale “meat factories.” China (China!) enacts a ban on growth-promoting uses of antibiotics in […]
Chicago Public Schools announced they will begin buying and serving chicken drumsticks from birds raised in the local area without antibiotics. The deal will bring 1.2 million pounds of chicken to 473 schools per year. It’s a big move for many reasons. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna explains why.
What makes hospital-acquired infections so intractable? There’s no question that some of the organisms that cause them are tricky: MRSA hangs out on the skin and and in the nostrils, and E. coli resides in the gut, making it easy for them to be carried into hospitals undetected. Hospital workers’ poor performance on hand-washing is […]