Journalist and Author
The worldwide polio-eradication initiative has delivered a report on the global effort that is striking for its brutally frank and even frustrated tone. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna breaks down the findings.
Federal health authorities have determined responsibility for the vast 26-state outbreak of Listeria in cantaloupes, almost 3 months — and 123 illnesses, 25 deaths and one miscarriage — since it began. In a long report released this week, they say they found Listeria not in the fields where the melons were grown, but in the packing and cold storage facilities on the single large farm where they all came from; and, in addition, they identified some practices on the farm that may have caused Listeria contamination or allowed it to multiply.
It’s been more than a year since the “Indian superbug” NDM-1 — not actually a bacterium, but a gene that directs production of an enzyme — hit the news. The enzyme, whose acronym is short for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1, disables almost all antibiotics directed against it, leaving the bacteria in which the gene appears vulnerable […]
A tantalizing prospect surfaced yesterday. The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis tweeted a link to a Sept. 13 story from an online agricultural trade journal that said, in its entirety: China’s Ministry of Agriculture has announced a forthcoming ban on antibiotics as growth promoters in animal feed. The ban is supported by […]
Are wash room door handles, hot-air blowers and bathroom design increasing our chances of infection? Superbug’s Maryn McKenna takes a look at the research on the germiest hazards in public places, and a little on better design.
This Tuesday, Oct. 4, marks the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the first deaths in the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks, the first successful, fatal bioterrorist attack in American history on American soil. The anthrax attacks were recognized in the midst of the grief and disquiet that swept the United States after the Sept. 11 World […]
I’ve been away at a couple of very interesting conferences — more on those soon — so I’m late to this story; on the other hand, the story hasn’t even peaked yet, and thus there’s plenty of time for us to catch up. So: An outbreak of foodborne illness that appears to be spread by […]
Between Sept. 11 and Oct. 4, 2001, the United States was paralyzed by fear: First of terrorism, from the World Trade Center attacks, and then of bioterrorism, because so many government planners believed a biowarfare attack would follow a conventional one. They were right. In this ongoing excerpt from Beating Back the Devil, a history […]
Physicians from the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Rafael, California, say they have found an unexpected amount of pertussis — whooping cough — in pre-teen children who had received their mandatory school-entry vaccination booster at age 5 and should have been protected from the disease until about the time of their final childhood booster dose at age 12.
The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center permanently changed the landscape of New York City and the tenor of American society — and, at the same time, the jobs of the disease detectives of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who are called the Epidemic Intelligence Service. The EIS started in […]
How does drug-resistance in bacteria spread around the world so quickly? A team of researchers suggested Saturday at an international infectious-disease conference that seagulls might be to blame.
Good news, but not excellent news, today from the US Department of Agriculture: It has agreed that, starting in March 2012, six more strains of E. coli will be considered “adulterants,” putting them in the same regulatory category as the much-feared E. coli O157:H7. It is a big step, to do this. Those six bacterial […]
Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reconstructs the government’s bioterrorism response to 9/11 in the first of several excerpts from her book, Beating Back the Devil.
The movie Contagion takes seriously its epidemiology, virology and sober sense of how unprepared most Americans are for a mass-casualty disaster. But is it realistic? Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna asks the film’s science adviser in a Q&A.
The CDC has noticed a Japanese suicide trend creeping into the United States: self-exposure to toxic fumes. The practice is not only deadly, but also dangerous for emergency personnel. Blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
The CDC reports that Rhode Island and New York’s 159 cases of a tick-borne disease were caused by transfusions in the past 30 years — and that risk may be on the rise. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
In the CDC’s weekly bulletin today, there’s a report: 58 percent of the antibiotic prescriptions given to kids and pre-teens during medical office visits are for conditions for which antibiotics are not necessary. And that’s an improvement. It’s a sign of how difficult it has become to change the trend of over-use of antibiotics in […]
I’m flattered to say that I’m the latest guest at the excellent site The Open Notebook, where veteran science writers Jeanne Erdmann and Siri Carpenter run deep-dive interviews with writers, bloggers and journalists about what underlies their stories. We talk about how I got on the scary-disease beat, what journals I read, how I organize […]
Very bad news from China, as reported by Xinhua and confirmed by the World Health Organization: For the first time in 12 years, polio paralysis has surfaced in China. Four children, the oldest 2 years old, were diagnosed with polio in mid-July. They all live in Hotan prefecture in Xinjiang province (by weird coincidence, also […]
Nearly 200 critical drugs are in short supply in the United States, and the FDA has no way to force their production. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna recounts tales of patients and doctors impacted by scant supplies.