Journalist and Author
Helpful bacteria in our intestines take a pounding during an antibiotics treatment, but normally recover. Or so we thought. A new study suggests the drugs may permanently alter collections of healthy microbes in pregnant women and young children — for worse.
When U.S. military hospitals abroad extend care to local residents, they may invite in highly drug-resistant organisms that could endanger their troops. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
Another week, another food-safety crisis in China. Several news networks — Associated Press, Australian Press and Xinhua — report that 11 people have died and anywhere from 120 to 140 were sickened by contaminated vinegar. Stoking tensions further is the reason so many were poisoned at once: The victims live in a small village in […]
In all the latest bad news about bacteria becoming highly resistant — through carbapenem resistance, or the “Indian supergene” NDM-1 — there has been one hopeful thread: All of the organisms have remained susceptible to one very old, little-used drug called colistin. That might be about to change. Which would be very, very bad news.
One of the perennial problems blocking polio eradication is the persistent belief that the rounds of vaccination meant to protect children are actually a covert campaign to harm them. I’ve seen it myself, in my reporting, and studies examining the 23-year effort’s inability to get to zero describe it as well. From the sanitized safety […]
In the midst of the giant Salmonella Heidelberg outbreak last week — now up to 107 cases in 31 states, and triggering a recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey — it was easy to miss that a second and even more troubling strain of resistant Salmonella is on the move. As I wrote […]
In strict legal terms, there may have been no wrongdoing in the distribution of the drug-resistant Salmonella strain in turkey that has killed one person and sickened 78. Salmonella is not classified by the federal government as something that is illegal to distribute.
If you’re a strain of Salmonella, it’s a very good week. If you’re a human, not so much. There are two stories occurring simultaneously that underline the rising danger of drug-resistant organisms in the food supply, and the porousness of networks for detecting the dangerous bugs in time.
A British couple have been convicted and jailed for running a black market in veterinary drugs that was so large, it earned more money than legal sales of the same drugs — 6 million pounds (almost $10 million) just in the United Kingdom where the case was brought. (In a detail that seems made for […]
Vacationers in northwest France are being warned to stay away from beaches, which are growing a bumper crop of a seaweed that releases a potentially toxic gas. The culprit: Up-stream releases of manure from intensive farming that overload the near-shore waters with nitrates. The seaweed (sea lettuce, Ulva lactuca) must be removed within 48 hours […]
Over the weekend, I sat in an airport in the midwestern United States for a 12-hour stretch, trying to get a standby seat. Time after time, the goal was in sight — the customer service agents and the video screen hanging from the ceiling all told me I was No. 1 on the waitlist — […]
Warner Brothers has released the first trailer for CONTAGION, a Steven Soderbergh bio-thriller about an influenza strain gone virally rogue that will open Sept. 9. Quoting from the movie’s website: “Contagion” follows the rapid progress of a lethal airborne virus that kills within days. As the fast-moving epidemic grows, the worldwide medical community races to […]
A number of years ago, I was in New Delhi, at the end of an exhausting 18 hours in which I had torn around the city to watch a National Immunization Day. On those days — like a national holiday, with flags and banners and kids let out from school — tens of millions of […]
Among the many unintended consequences of the 30-year AIDS epidemic has been a profound change in status for other sexually transmitted diseases. It feels slightly bizarre, for anyone who came of age after HIV arrived, to realize that syphilis and gonorrhea and their ilk were once as profoundly dreaded as AIDS is now, so important […]
The latest news from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the EU’s CDC, suggests that the massive outbreak of E. coli O104 is declining. The number of new cases being discovered has fallen, and the most recent onset of illness among confirmed cases was June 27. The toll is now 752 cases of […]
So, antibiotic resistance: We care about it, right? The World Health Organization does: It made antimicrobial resistance the theme of this year’s World Health Day. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does. The journal Lancet Infectious Diseases says it’s a “global health concern.” The major association for infectious disease physicians has pleaded for attention. […]
Here’s my second report from the World Conference of Science Journalists — and if you thought the first one on diabetes in China was depressing, just wait for this one. Since I wrote SUPERBUG the book and started this blog, I’ve been fascinated by stresses and problems in food production. (For evidence, see any of […]
I’ve been away the past week at the World Conference of Science Journalists, a biannual gathering that brought 726 writers and broadcasters from 87 countries to Doha, Qatar. I was there to give a presentation about blogging, and also because I organized two panels on under-reported epidemics and on food and farming issues in the […]
There’s a new paper out in the CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that makes a provocative claim: There is enough similarity between drug-resistance genes in E. coli carried by chickens and E. coli infecting humans that the chickens may be the source of it. If it is correct — and it seems plausible and is […]
The past few days have seen the simultaneous publication of the first vetted medical-journal pieces on the vast European outbreak of E. coli O104. They’re fascinating for what they report that is new about this perplexing epidemic — now up to 3,802 cases including 43 deaths, according to the World Health Organization — and also […]